Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth [1 ed.] 0262044455, 9780262044455

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CRI T I C A L Z ON E S The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth

CRI T I C A L Z ON E S The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth

EDITED BY

Bruno Latour — Peter Weibel

PUBLISHED BY ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany — The MIT Press Cambridge, MA / London, England

CRI T I C A L Z ON E S The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth

EDITED BY

Bruno Latour — Peter Weibel

PUBLISHED BY ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany — The MIT Press Cambridge, MA / London, England

Authors names Preface KSB

II.

DISCONNECTED

— 131 —

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel Preface — 131 —

SEVEN OBJECTIONS AGAINST LANDING ON EARTH

DISORIENTATION — 131 —

Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty When the Global Reveals the Planetary: Bruno Latour Interviews Dipesh Chakrabarty — 131 —

— 131 —

Pierre Charbonnier “Where is Your Freedom Now?” How the Moderns Became Ubiquitous

Jérôme Gaillardet The Critical Zone, a Buffer Zone, the Human Habitat

Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia?

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Alexandra Arènes Traveling through the Critical Zone

Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil Distinguishing Gaia from the Earth System(s)

— 131 —

— 131 —

Timothy Mitchell Uber eats: How Capitalism Consumes the Future — 131 —

— 131 —

Jan Zalasiewicz The Anthropocene Square Meter

Steve Banwart Domesticating Soil in Earth's Critical Zone — 131 —

Robert Boschman Uranium City Series on Abandonment, Two Field Trips

Gerard de Vries

What on Earth Does Climate Have to Do With Law and Liberty? Revisiting Montesquieus Theory of Climate — 131 —

— 131 —

Clémence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon The Infinity of the Anthropocene: A (Hi)story with a Thousand Names — 131 —

Robert Boschman Climate Snap: At the Sign of the White Flower — 131 —

Karen Holmberg Landing on the Terrestrial Volcano

Marie-Claire Pierret The Strengbach Catchment Environmental Observatory: A Needful Key for a Global Investigation of the Critical Zone — 131 —

— 131 —

Sonia Levy For the Love of Corals: Life In the Ruins of the Museum

Matthieu Duperrex Landscape and Hybrid Sedimentology — 131 —

Stefanie Rau Words for a Tongue We Are Losing — 131 —

Susan L. Brantley The Critical Zone Paradigm – A Personal View — 131 —

Daniel D. Richter and Sharon A. Billings Ansichten der Calzone: Views of the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory — 131 —

William E. Dietrich The Critical Zone Revelation – I Am in the Skin

— 131 —

Richard Powers The Story So Far — 131 —

17

Sébastien Dutreuil Gaia Is Alive — 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg Life in a Bubble: The Failure of Biosphere 2 as a Total System — 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg Tied Back to Urth: Biosphere 2 Revisited — 131 —

Pauline Goul 1610 Wood/cut: the Anthropocene, Uprooted — 131 —

— 131 —

Alexander W. Schindler and Anne Schreiber The Mechanical Discovery of Ultrastability

Aleksandar Rankovic A Stroll through the Critical Zone: Exploring the Agency of Trees, Soils, and Microbes in the Streets of Paris

— 131 —

— 131 —

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha Wetness Is Everywhere; Why Do We See Water Somewhere? — 131 —

Joseph Leo Koerner Geognosy — 131 —

Simon Schaffer Beware of Precursors: How Not to Trace the History of the Critical Zone — 131 —

— 131 —

John Tresch Around the Pluriverse in Eight Objects: Cosmograms for the Critical Zone

GAIA

— 131 —

— 131 —

I.

CRITICAL ZONES

IV.

— 131 —

Paul Jobin Extractivism in the Critical Zone

— 131 —

III.

Ali Gharib The Star Trek Universe: An Idealized Humanity in Virtualized Space — 131 —

Bruno Latour Sara Sze as a Sculptor of Critical Zones — 131 —

Jeanne Etelain This Planet Which Is Not One: On the Notion of Zone — 131 —

Siegfried Zielinski The World as Organism and Machine: Jesuit Geophysics in the Early Modern Period — 131 —

Laura Dassow Walls Recalling Humboldt’s Planet — 131 —

18

Authors names Preface KSB

II.

DISCONNECTED

— 131 —

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel Preface — 131 —

SEVEN OBJECTIONS AGAINST LANDING ON EARTH

DISORIENTATION — 131 —

Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty When the Global Reveals the Planetary: Bruno Latour Interviews Dipesh Chakrabarty — 131 —

— 131 —

Pierre Charbonnier “Where is Your Freedom Now?” How the Moderns Became Ubiquitous

Jérôme Gaillardet The Critical Zone, a Buffer Zone, the Human Habitat

Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia?

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Alexandra Arènes Traveling through the Critical Zone

Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil Distinguishing Gaia from the Earth System(s)

— 131 —

— 131 —

Timothy Mitchell Uber eats: How Capitalism Consumes the Future — 131 —

— 131 —

Jan Zalasiewicz The Anthropocene Square Meter

Steve Banwart Domesticating Soil in Earth's Critical Zone — 131 —

Robert Boschman Uranium City Series on Abandonment, Two Field Trips

Gerard de Vries

What on Earth Does Climate Have to Do With Law and Liberty? Revisiting Montesquieus Theory of Climate — 131 —

— 131 —

Clémence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon The Infinity of the Anthropocene: A (Hi)story with a Thousand Names — 131 —

Robert Boschman Climate Snap: At the Sign of the White Flower — 131 —

Karen Holmberg Landing on the Terrestrial Volcano

Marie-Claire Pierret The Strengbach Catchment Environmental Observatory: A Needful Key for a Global Investigation of the Critical Zone — 131 —

— 131 —

Sonia Levy For the Love of Corals: Life In the Ruins of the Museum

Matthieu Duperrex Landscape and Hybrid Sedimentology — 131 —

Stefanie Rau Words for a Tongue We Are Losing — 131 —

Susan L. Brantley The Critical Zone Paradigm – A Personal View — 131 —

Daniel D. Richter and Sharon A. Billings Ansichten der Calzone: Views of the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory — 131 —

William E. Dietrich The Critical Zone Revelation – I Am in the Skin

— 131 —

Richard Powers The Story So Far — 131 —

17

Sébastien Dutreuil Gaia Is Alive — 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg Life in a Bubble: The Failure of Biosphere 2 as a Total System — 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg Tied Back to Urth: Biosphere 2 Revisited — 131 —

Pauline Goul 1610 Wood/cut: the Anthropocene, Uprooted — 131 —

— 131 —

Alexander W. Schindler and Anne Schreiber The Mechanical Discovery of Ultrastability

Aleksandar Rankovic A Stroll through the Critical Zone: Exploring the Agency of Trees, Soils, and Microbes in the Streets of Paris

— 131 —

— 131 —

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha Wetness Is Everywhere; Why Do We See Water Somewhere? — 131 —

Joseph Leo Koerner Geognosy — 131 —

Simon Schaffer Beware of Precursors: How Not to Trace the History of the Critical Zone — 131 —

— 131 —

John Tresch Around the Pluriverse in Eight Objects: Cosmograms for the Critical Zone

GAIA

— 131 —

— 131 —

I.

CRITICAL ZONES

IV.

— 131 —

Paul Jobin Extractivism in the Critical Zone

— 131 —

III.

Ali Gharib The Star Trek Universe: An Idealized Humanity in Virtualized Space — 131 —

Bruno Latour Sara Sze as a Sculptor of Critical Zones — 131 —

Jeanne Etelain This Planet Which Is Not One: On the Notion of Zone — 131 —

Siegfried Zielinski The World as Organism and Machine: Jesuit Geophysics in the Early Modern Period — 131 —

Laura Dassow Walls Recalling Humboldt’s Planet — 131 —

18

V.

VI.

VII.

TERRESTRIAL

DIVIDED

DEPICTION

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Bruno Latour “We Don’t Seem to live on the Same Planet” – A Fictional Planetarium

Joseph Leo Koerner Nature Painting

Isabelle Stengers The Earth Won't Let Itself Be Watched — 131 —

— 131 —

VIII.

SUSPENDED — 131 —

Peter Weibel My Earth Odyssey — 131 —

— 131 —

Verónica Calvo Valenzuela Tarabuco — 131 —

Sarah Vanuxem Freedom through Easements — 131 —

Dorothea Condé and Pierre-Yves Condé Turning Sovereignty Upside Down — 131 —

Estelle Zhong Mengual The Point of View of the Mountain — 131 —

Vinciane Despret Inhabiting the Phonocene with Birds

Mira Hirtz Embodied Constellation: Reflections on the Seven Planets Exercise — 131 —

Nikolaj Schultz Life as Exodus — 131 —

Daniel Irrgang Transhumanist Eschatology

Simon Schaffer On the Difficulty of Animating the Earth

— 131 —

Emilie Hache Born from Earth: A New Myth for Earthbounds — 131 —

— 131 —

Bruno Latour and Ali Gharib Neo Rauch’s Unknown Masterpiece — 131 —

Lena Reitschuster Beyond Individuals Lynn Margulis and Her Holobiontic Worlds — 131 —

Frédérique Aït-Touati Arts of Inhabiting: Ancient and New Theaters of the World — 131 —

Olga Lukyanova Depicting Holobiont — 131 —

Donna Haraway Carrier Bags for Critical Zones — 131 —

Michael Flower

Johanna Ziebritzk Sensorium of the Earthbound

— 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg and Martin Guinard Observatories for Terrestrial Politics: Sensing the Critical Zones — 131 —

Bronislaw Szerszynski The Grammar of Action in the Critical Zone

— 131 —

Yohji Suzuki Fabian in 1621, A Divided Soul

Hanna Jurisch Museum of Natural History

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Jennifer Gabrys Sensing a Moving Planet

Emanuele Coccia Nature Is Not Your Household — 131 —

How to Visualize Cells as Overlapping Trajectories of Profiles — 131 —

Jonathan Gray The Datafication of Forests? From the Wood Wide Web to the Internet of Trees — 131 —

Benedikte Zitouni The Promises of the New Wetlands — 131 —

Nikolaj Schultz New Climate, New Class Struggles — 131 —

Joseph Leo Koerner Self-Portrait in Distress

Anna Krzywoszynska Soil Care Network: Caring for Soil as Building Relations — 131 —

Daria Mille Trajectories of Modernization in Russia: Artists Recalibrating the Sensorium — 131 —

APPENDIX

— 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg, Rachel Libeskind, Robert Preusse, Stefanie Rau Glossolalia: Tidings from Terrestrial Tongues

Pierre Wat The Skin of the World — 131 —

List of works — 131 —

Authors biographies — 131 —

Index of names — 131 —

19

20

V.

VI.

VII.

TERRESTRIAL

DIVIDED

DEPICTION

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Bruno Latour “We Don’t Seem to live on the Same Planet” – A Fictional Planetarium

Joseph Leo Koerner Nature Painting

Isabelle Stengers The Earth Won't Let Itself Be Watched — 131 —

— 131 —

VIII.

SUSPENDED — 131 —

Peter Weibel My Earth Odyssey — 131 —

— 131 —

Verónica Calvo Valenzuela Tarabuco — 131 —

Sarah Vanuxem Freedom through Easements — 131 —

Dorothea Condé and Pierre-Yves Condé Turning Sovereignty Upside Down — 131 —

Estelle Zhong Mengual The Point of View of the Mountain — 131 —

Vinciane Despret Inhabiting the Phonocene with Birds

Mira Hirtz Embodied Constellation: Reflections on the Seven Planets Exercise — 131 —

Nikolaj Schultz Life as Exodus — 131 —

Daniel Irrgang Transhumanist Eschatology

Simon Schaffer On the Difficulty of Animating the Earth

— 131 —

Emilie Hache Born from Earth: A New Myth for Earthbounds — 131 —

— 131 —

Bruno Latour and Ali Gharib Neo Rauch’s Unknown Masterpiece — 131 —

Lena Reitschuster Beyond Individuals Lynn Margulis and Her Holobiontic Worlds — 131 —

Frédérique Aït-Touati Arts of Inhabiting: Ancient and New Theaters of the World — 131 —

Olga Lukyanova Depicting Holobiont — 131 —

Donna Haraway Carrier Bags for Critical Zones — 131 —

Michael Flower

Johanna Ziebritzk Sensorium of the Earthbound

— 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg and Martin Guinard Observatories for Terrestrial Politics: Sensing the Critical Zones — 131 —

Bronislaw Szerszynski The Grammar of Action in the Critical Zone

— 131 —

Yohji Suzuki Fabian in 1621, A Divided Soul

Hanna Jurisch Museum of Natural History

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

— 131 —

Jennifer Gabrys Sensing a Moving Planet

Emanuele Coccia Nature Is Not Your Household — 131 —

How to Visualize Cells as Overlapping Trajectories of Profiles — 131 —

Jonathan Gray The Datafication of Forests? From the Wood Wide Web to the Internet of Trees — 131 —

Benedikte Zitouni The Promises of the New Wetlands — 131 —

Nikolaj Schultz New Climate, New Class Struggles — 131 —

Joseph Leo Koerner Self-Portrait in Distress

Anna Krzywoszynska Soil Care Network: Caring for Soil as Building Relations — 131 —

Daria Mille Trajectories of Modernization in Russia: Artists Recalibrating the Sensorium — 131 —

APPENDIX

— 131 —

Bettina Korintenberg, Rachel Libeskind, Robert Preusse, Stefanie Rau Glossolalia: Tidings from Terrestrial Tongues

Pierre Wat The Skin of the World — 131 —

List of works — 131 —

Authors biographies — 131 —

Index of names — 131 —

19

20

Welcome address of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

A VIEW OF HISTORY in favor with climatologists likens the technological modern age to a jet plane flying kilometers above the Earth when the people on board suddenly realize that nobody has thought of building a runway to land on. What now? Who is going to pilot the highly sophisticated “Flying Ship Progress” back to Earth without crashing it? Who will ensure that measures are down-to-Earth and that our social system is in accord with the terrestrial facts? This problem includes the fact that the planet’s resources are finite, something that the Club of Rome drew attention to as early as 1972. Also, as the Western world has only recently become aware, the position of human beings needs to be redefined in a new way, as being in a symbiotic relationship with other biological, chemical, and geological realities. We are not flying “up above and over” the Earth. We are dependent with every fiber of our existence on the metabolic processes taking place on Earth: already the air we breathe is a byproduct of plant photosynthesis, energy intake is the result of a somatic alliance with bacteria, and even our immune system reveals bit by bit its genetically embedded relationship with viruses. Of all things, a virus, one of the tiniest life forms – as small as a human being is in relation to planet Earth – has impacted the globalized societies of the present-day in the weeks before this book went to press and has sent them dangerously reeling. The “corona shock” is already being defined as an epochal caesura. And as a wake-up call for the international community to find collective responses to the great questions of our time. The virus did not stop at borders. Climate change does not, either. What Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel state in this book applies to both crises: they focus their view on the planet, even though we do not have a planetary form of governance. And not only that: we also have comparatively little experience with forms of representation that go beyond scientific discourse and make the “planetary grounding” of society outlined in this book a public experience. This is a new mission for cultural institutions and the arts, as the editors demand. Thus, this book is not a catalog like those that usually accompany exhibitions. Rather – as stated in the Introduction – it is more a “Handbook for Practicing Landings in the Future.” It is a space for trying out new encounters with science, politics, arts, and civil society; a place for critiquing conventional cartographies and world models, and – here, we must not delay – for practicing a language that enables people to spell out their relation to the Earth in a new way. The German Federal Cultural Foundation thanks the entire team of the ZKM | Center for Art Media under Peter Weibel, who together with Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard, and Bettina Korintenberg, have developed and prepared the Critical Zones exhibition, and also the artists, the representatives from the sciences, civil society, politics, and administration for implementing the exhibition and for this brilliant book, for which we wish great success and many, many readers.

Hortensia Völckers Member of the Executive Board / Artistic Director Kirsten Haß Member of the Executive Board / Administrative Director

25

26

1

2

SEVEN OBJECTIONS AGAINST LANDING ON EARTH

As everyone learned in school, when our idea of the position of the Earth in the cosmos is modified, a revolution in the social order may ensue. Remember Galileo: when astronomers declared that the Earth moves around the Sun, it felt as though the whole fabric of society was under attack. — — 1

1 Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). Originally written in German as Leben des Galilei in 1938/39.

the stupefaction of the rich enlightened portion of the human race — as terra incognita (see Gaillardet, this volume, xxx–xxx). Such is the juncture from which this publication takes its departure: The intrusion of an Earth with a surprising shape, size, contents, and activity that triggers a triple feeling of disorientation; first, in space — where are we located?; then, in time — in which period do we find ourselves?; finally, in identity — who are we, what sort of agency do we possess, how do we cope with such nov“LANDING ON EARTH? WHY WOULD ANYONE AT- elty, how do we make sure we don’t behave too badTEMP T TO LAND THERE? AREN’ T WE ALREADY ly? This historical moment — rendered earlier by euphemisms such as “ecological crisis” or “climate change” ON EARTH?” — now would best be taken as an existential crisis, a matWell, not quite! And that’s the circumstance this book ter of life and death. tries to present to the inquiring reader: it seems that in the past there has been some misinterpretation of what “IF YOU WANT US TO GET READY FOR SUCH A MAit means to be earthly. If you believe it means “practi- JOR UPHEAVAL, WHY D O YOU ADVERTISE YOUR cal,” “mundane,” “secular,” “material,” or even “material- PROJECT WITH AN EXPRESSION LIKE ‘CRITICAL ZONE,’ WHICH HAS NO MEANING IN PUBLIC ist,” you’re in for a surprise. DISCOURSE?” Members of modern industrial societies had long prided themselves on being “down to earth,” “rational,” “objective,” and above all “realist,” but now suddenly they But that’s exactly why we like the term! “Zone” is well have discovered that they need an Earth to continue to chosen precisely because it has no settled meaning! It live — and live well (see Stengers, this volume, xxx–xxx). designates something of uncertain status, unclear deShouldn’t they have carefully surveyed the span, size, and lineation, unsettling atmosphere. It is exactly what you location of the very land on which they were supposed need to redirect attention away from “territory,” “Heimat,” to reside and spread out? Wasn’t surveying and map- “land,” “soil,” “homeland,” or “landscape”; and above all, ping what they were doing when they engaged for centu- from the Earth viewed from the outside as can be seen ries in what they still celebrate as “the Age of Discovery”? in countless atlases or clicked on in so many GPS devicHow odd that, after having assembled so many maps of es. To underline that the place to land is alien, there is no so many foreign lands, collating so many views from so better way, it seems, than to call it a zone. Does the word many landscapes, drawing so many versions of what they not perfectly stress its Unheimlichkeit (see Etelain, this called “the Globe,” they now appear to be taken aback volume, xxx–xxx)? by the novelty of this newly emerging Earth (see SchafFor us, anyway, the Critical Zone is the invention of a fer, “Beware of Precursors,” this volume, xxx–xxx)? Of all few scientists, mostly from the Earth sciences and geopeople, shouldn’t they have been the best prepared for chemistry, as a way to bring different disciplines togethsuch a discovery?2 er in order to refresh the study of the thin skin of the livAnd yet — should we really be surprised? — the intru- ing Earth (see Dietrich, this volume, xxx–xxx). To be sure, sion of the Earth strikes them as a shock. It appears that the adjective “critical” has many meanings, as you will the Globe they expected to list, register, locate, enclose, see in this volume. Each scientist has a different take on and gobble up was no more than a very provisional ren- it: “far from thermodynamic equilibrium,” “fragile,” “water dering of what there remains to discover; that the Glob- chemistry,” “interface,” “what should be protected,” what al they claim to travel through so effortlessly is no more could abruptly cross “a tipping point,” and many others. than a provincial view of the whole that is yet to be as- What all those meanings have in common, however, is to stress that planet Earth — in its astronomical or geologsembled; that even this materialism they promoted with such enthusiasm might have been in effect a rather ide- ical sense — is not sufficient to define where we reside, al version of what materiality really implies (see Chakra- and that we need another frame to situate all the phenomena critical for us — that is, we humans and all the barty, this volume, xxx–xxx). In the end, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Earth again appears — to other life forms! Today, four centuries later, the role and the position of the Earth is being revolutionized by new disciplines: human activities have seemed to push the Earth to react in unexpected ways. Once again, the whole organization of society is being subverted. Shake the cosmic order and the order of politics will be shaken as well. Except that this time, the question is not one of making the Earth move around the Sun, but of moving it somewhere else altogether! As if we had to learn anew how to land on it.

2 Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

3

The fact is that taking the planet as a globe obliges you “IF THE SITUATION IS AS YOU CLAIM, WHY WOULD to squeeze the Critical Zone to nothing. Haven’t you ever YOU CALL YOUR BOOK ‘ THE SCIENCE AND POLIworried that when you say that the Earth is a planet, that TICS OF LANDING ON EARTH’? CERTAINLY, THE it is a globe, you actually have to mentally position your- LAST THING YOU WANT WOULD BE TO MIX THE self as if you were considering it from out in space? To FACTS OF SCIENCE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS, CORRECT?” be sure, a few dozen astronauts have been there, in a few noisy tinkered space machines, and they took a few pictures, but humans don’t live there and it’s not what Yes, of course, it would be nice if we could keep them they see in front of their eyes. This is why “Critical Zone” apart, but it’s rather unrealistic in times of sudden revis such a useful term: it helps us to free our imagina- olutions in thinking about how the Earth moves, as oction from the attraction of the too-famous Blue Marble. curred on a similar scale when the Earth, in the sevenWe are not space aliens. We reside inside a thin bio- teenth century, was set in motion after millenaries of film no thicker than a few kilometers up and down, from keeping still. What a fuss they made out of this expulwhich we cannot escape — and, “Critical Zonists” would sion of planet Earth from the center of the cosmos, to let add, whose reactions (chemical alterations and geolog- it swing and veer around the Sun. What drama they latical mechanisms, as well as social processes) are still er staged around what they used to call “the scientific largely unknown. revolution.” And how proud they have been, ever since, The reason we get enamored with the term “Critical of having extirpated the roots of all past beliefs, disprovZone” in this publication is not only because it breaks en the ancient cosmologies, and transformed all religious down the cartographical view of planet Earth, but also attachments into mere mythologies. Most enlightened because it complicates and interrupts the legal and po- people today still believe that this play is not a staged litical unity of any global view. The professional disease drama but the real movement of history! So much so that of looking too long at physical globes or clicking too of- they find themselves today landless, as if suspended in ten on digital maps causes people to end up believing midair, searching for a solid Earth to relocate their lives. that because data are projected on a sphere, they are, Whatever your view of the scientific revolution might for this reason, as if by a magic wand, unified, continu- be, you must admit that it reallocated in a major way what ous, and homogeneous. We should never forget that a certainty could be expected from science, how the mateglobe is never bigger than the screen (or piece of paper) rial world had to be conceived, what should be the place on which it is spread. The figure of a globe doesn’t unify of religious beliefs, the function of the arts, the role of mowhat it registers: it simply points at some dataset.3 rality, the skills necessary for politics, the solidity of legal ties, and how a free subject is supposed to behave. Were So, the great advantage of speaking of the Critical Zone instead of planet Earth is to resist the temptation we to enter a period of similar turmoil with the Earth once again destroying our contemporary ways of life, then of confusing tiny, fragile, and provisional models of the Earth system with the scientific endeavor and, especially, you’d better prepare yourself for such a major upheavwith the political work of unifying the said planet for good. al. Surely more than one new drama would have to be reThis confusion has until now been the bane of many eco- staged (see Aït-Touati, this volume, xxx–xxx). Well, is this not exactly what’s happening with the new logically minded people paralyzed by their imagery of global views. In the hands of Critical Zonists, on the con- intrusion of an Earth moving out of its orbit and communitrary, zones appear patchy, heterogeneous, discontinu- cating, to the horrified view of its participants, that it has a behavior in addition to its celestial motion? And that it ous. As you will see in this book, there is nothing more divisive than those patches. This is why, in the layout of reacts to the actions of humans in ways that are quicker this publication, we have done our best to reject the use and more widespread than everything they previously exof any balloon form, any pumpkin-sized Mother Earth, any pected from the material world they had intended to domBlue Planet, or any “green stuff,” and multiplied the ob- inate (see Zalasiewicz, this volume, xxx–xxx)? Suddenly servatories to capture the Earth’s diversity. Our colors are we realize that the first moving Earth of Galilean times, in spite of its celestial motion, offered in fact a solid, stadarker — or at least dappled! ble, taken for granted, immutable, and in a way, yes, fixed If you desire politics to settle an issue, don’t count on and immobile ground compared to the quick pace of the a unified “Nature” to do the composition for you; you’ll have to compose the Critical Zone, bit by bit, element by new moving Earth — a pace even faster than that of human history! If Erdkunde means “the tidings of the Earth,” element. No shortcuts allowed.

3 Bruno Latour with Christophe Leclercq, eds., Reset Modernity!, exhib. cat., ZKM | Karlsruhe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016).

4

BRUNO LATOUR

represents, over a few years, is what people now call the then the messages it carries are even more troubling (see Koerner, “Geognosy,” this volume, xxx–xxx). The Earth is “great acceleration” in climate change, and, at a longer time scale, the brusque shift from what geologists have moving yet again, and indeed it makes everything else named the Holocene — the almost straight horizontal line move at once, as if on the back of a wild horse. for the last 12,000 years — to the Anthropocene — the Sorry, but the idea of keeping science and politics in well-separated compartments works only for peace- other straight but vertical line, that keeps drilling through ful periods, not when there is simultaneously an accel- all those charts scientists are so tired of commenting on eration in the trajectory of the Earth and a sort of para- and their audience so terrified to look at. Remember how, lyzing inertia in how humans react to the reacting Earth. in the 1950s, a country was on the path to development Just as at the time of the first “scientific revolution,” every when it was “taking off”? Well, this is a perfect illustration of what can only be defined as a “lift off.” Modernizstatement of fact will necessarily be taken for an alarm, a ers, from wherever they live, have cut all ties between the call for action, a policy statement, an unbearable intrusion world they live in and the one they live from: they have eson someone else’s beliefs, values, and interests. Witness the widespread denial of climate science. The cosmic or- caped gravity. All those drawings with a long horizontal line, a blip, and then an almost perfectly vertical line are der is being shaken too much for the distribution of social powers to remain the same. In this book, we try to drama- as many signatures of the manic Zeitgeist. At a more precise historical scale, however, the inhertize those links between science and politics as freely as ent ubiquity or duplicity of the modernizers is not so repossible, not to feign that it is possible to escape from a 4 cent a phenomenon. It was long in coming. Should we new settlement. choose 1610, 1789, 1945? It does not matter much. “EVEN IF READERS SWALLOW YOUR ‘CRITICAL Because what is clear is that once it became possible, ZONE’ AND ITS NEW MIXTURE OF SCIENCE AND through the combined enterprise of colonization, slavPOLITICS, YOU HAVEN’ T A CHANCE, ALTHOUGH ery, transportation, and technology, to add to an econYOU CLAIMED IT ’S YOUR STARTING POINT, TO omy of so many acres another virtual economy of many CONVINCE THEM THAT THEY LIVE ESTRANGED more “ghost acreages,” situated far away in another land, FROM THEIR OWN ABODE AND ARE IN URGENT then the gap between the two worlds began to widen,6 NEED OF BEING SHIPPED SOMEWHERE ELSE.” not only in space but also in time (see Mitchell, this volume, xxx–xxx). Economy, the science of managing limitOn the contrary, that’s not very much of a challenge, at ed resources, has become an argument for forgetting all least if by “readers,” you mean members of the modern or limits.7 This has especially been true for coal, oil, and gas, modernized section of the audience. those true ghost acreages, hidden deep in the ground, It would actually be a fairly good definition of “mod- that made economists feel they finally had access to inern” people to say that they live off a land that they don’t finity — finally, that is, before finding themselves coping inhabit. At least, they live in between two worlds: one is with finitude again. where they have their habits, the protection of law, their What gives the present tragedy its particular violence deeds of property, the support of their State, what we is that, because of the way the Earth has started to recould call the world they live in; and then, in addition, a act to human actions, the two territories can no longer be second world, a ghostly one, often far remote in time and kept quietly apart. Suddenly, modernizers find themselves space, that benefits from no legal protection, no clear de- cantilevered over an abyss: the world they live from irlineation of properties, and no State to defend its rights: rupts in the midst of the world they live in.8 Hence, the let’s call it the world they live from. It is out of this sec- present panic when faced with the irruption of all those ond world that modernizers have always extracted the re- entities, humans as well as sources necessary to maintain their illusion that they live more-than-humans: at once 4 See also Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures only in the first, in benign ignorance of the second one totally foreign — where do all on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Originally published (see Charbonnier, this volume, xxx–xxx). Moderns have al- those aliens come from? And in French as Face à Gaïa: huit conférences sur le nouways behaved like absentee landlords. terribly familiar — we always veau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte, 2015). If you find this too dramatized as a definition of mo- suspected that we were de5 Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate dernity, then it might be a good idea to look at the fa- pending on them. The face of Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). mous “hockey stick” graph, popularized by scientists ac- those two collapsing planets 6 See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, cumulating data on the new climatic regime.5 What it is not pretty to look at. Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

7 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011). 8 Pierre Charbonnier, Abondance et liberté (Paris: La Découverte, 2020).

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That’s what we mean by the intimation of landing on Earth: the task is to reconcile two definitions of territories that have been diverging wildly; or, to stay with the metaphor of flight, the goal for the modernizers is to try to land without crashing! So, you see, in the end, it shouldn’t be too hard to interest readers in reconnoitering the land where they are bound to settle.

“BUT IF YOU ARE RIGHT, THE COLLAPSE OF THOSE T WO TYPES OF PLANETARY BODIES MEANS THAT YOU WANT TO PLUNGE THE READER INTO THE MIDST OF MULTIPLE CONFLICTS. THE LAND YOU WANT THEM TO MOVE INTO IS NOTHING IF NOT A WAR ZONE!” Well, yes and no. Yes, because there is an existential crisis where the fights are over life and death; and no, because not one of the ancient patterns of war and revolution can be employed to make sense of those conflicts. That’s the shift in attitudes this volume tries to register. First, there is no well-defined front line where conflicting nation states could be recognized by their flags, its combatants easily spotted by their bright uniforms. To say that these are unconventional wars would be quite an understatement. Each nation state is divided inside itself and none of the issues to be tackled fits inside its borders. In addition, although people constantly argue that it is a global war, there is no unified enemy, each warrior having a different axe to grind, triggering a state of generalized guerrilla warfare. So, are we faced with civil wars? No, with something much worse, because each combatant is divided inside itself as well. We have to admit it: there is not one single issue — about what to eat, how to build a house, how to move in space, what clothing to wear, how to heat or cool a space, which resource to rely on, which production to favor, which plant to grow, which animal to defend, where to settle — not one issue that is not the source of a controversy with dividing lines crisscrossing each of the participants. And we cannot forget the long tail of unwanted consequences each decision is bound to trigger. You’re never sure whether you’re betraying the cause. These are conflicts where distinguishing friends and allies, and even deciding what to fight for, where, and for how long, is itself a major achievement (see Coccia, this volume, xxx–xxx), to the point that war metaphors often morph into moral puzzles, agonizing scruples, and dizzying dilemmas. This explains the strange mixture of total mobilization leading to a state of paralysis that transforms many of our contemporaries into moral wrecks.

You might say that you are prepared to defend your territory against incursions (pollutions, extractions, invasions, expulsions),9 but it remains a pantomime if the last thing you are able to do is to describe your territory in some plausible way. How can one expect relevant political reactions from people who ignore where they reside and what land they thrive from? Hence the importance we give in this publication to the apparently innocuous task of mere description (see Schultz, “New Climate, New Class Struggles,” this volume, xxx–xxx). It’s not some sort of luxury but the preliminary requirement for any landing on Earth. If there is any sense in building Critical Zone Observatories, it is to condense and rematerialize what it means to stand on a piece of land and to multiply the characters that will play parts in the plots to come. Which leads to the second reason that renders moot the classical patterns of war that humans are so well trained to impose on any dispute: these conflicts are in no way limited to human agents. Each of them entangles, in many counterintuitive ways, entities which had played no recognized role earlier, except as sites for military campaigns. We have had some ideas of waging wars against insects, but no idea of what it is to fight with them and even for them (apart from Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984). We knew that weather was important for waging wars, but what does it mean to win wars against some humans for the climate? We have long had experience in felling trees for fortifications, but how to cope with the novelty of fighting with and for the continuation and prosperity of trees, against some other humans yet to be named, spotted, and defined? It doesn’t seem possible to maintain even the appearance of war aims when the agents that are going to gain or to lose are no better defined than the front lines. And yet it’s a war for good, a war of extermination, no question about that — and of planetary dimensions. What in the twentieth century were called World Wars — and there was no lack of them — appear, by comparison, like so many limited conflicts. They did not engage the Planetary as such.10 Earth was the board on which conflicts were waged, not a party to those conflicts — and the one with the biggest stakes. But Earth is not a unified party either. It’s a multiplicity resisting any sort of unification (see Stengers, this volume, xxx–xxx). No wonder that right now people are at a loss to decide what to attack and what to defend. And it’s not very surprising that some wealthy members of the human race choose to secede entirely and to move to another planet altogether — “Ciao, you poor people! See you from Mars!” Right now, the urgent task

9 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (2019): 1–34.

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for the rest of us who have been, so to speak, left behind, is not to simplify the front lines; the task is to equip future participants with skills to draw them. The moment of description cannot be skipped.

“LET THEM GO TO MARS, THEN. BUT, CERTAINLY, YOU HAVE NOTICED THAT POLITICAL PARTIES EVERYWHERE ARE CLAMORING FOR A RETURN TO THE LAND OF OLD, PROTECTING THEIR IDENTITY BEHIND CLOSED BORDERS. IS THIS REALLY THE RIGHT MOMENT TO INSIST ON ‘SET TLING ON LAND’ AND ‘DEFENDING YOUR HEIMAT’? THIS SEEMS PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO REACTIONARY BLUT UND BODEN.” Thanks for being so blunt. Although the critique doesn’t bode well for our project, to be “perilously close” is our main point. If you think going to Mars is unrealistic, going back to the plot of land where the bones of your ancestors are buried might be even less so, after all! The reactionary turn to the comfort of the nation states, the present move back to “blood and soil,” might be as unrealistic as the temptation of escaping into outer space, but there is a logic in wanting to be protected. Now that the dream of living globally has vanished, you can’t reject people because they refuse to live spaceless. So, the question of what it means for a people to live in space, on land, from a soil is wide open all over again. Wanting to escape the divide between a world you live in and a world you live from cannot be morally condemned. Something else is at stake. That’s what we want to explore under the heading of Earthly Politics. If “Critical Zone” is scientifically as well as politically such an appealing term, it’s because it makes you realize how little is understood when it’s claimed that a land is “your” land (see Vanuxem, this volume, xxx–xxx). How many partners do you include in the production of your land? How thick do you calculate it has to be? 20 centimeters? 3 meters? 3 kilometers? What about the way water circulates through it all the way down to the deep rock beneath? Have you thought about its porosity and granularity? Are you sure you did not forget earthworms? When you say it’s “yours,” do you include the red sand blowing from the Sahara or the acid rain from Chinese factories? How would you react if you were told that it takes 100,000 years for a soil to be generated and, by some estimates, that there are only about 40 years left before it is depleted? Obviously, the soil you claim your ancestors are buried in is not exactly the same as the one revealed as the Critical Zone (see Richter and Billings,

this volume, xxx–xxx). The latter is much thicker, denser, older, and more populated than the first. Thus, they don’t generate the same identity crisis and, thus, don’t draw the same front lines either. As you can see, it’s one thing to celebrate your roots and quite another to learn from botany! Being earthly means that we have to be much more realistic about every item that was thought to make up “nature” in an earlier period. It requires another encyclopedic survey. For climate, it’s easy, since it has entered politics with much fracas. What was earlier the atmosphere above your land now requires a major struggle if you wish to keep it as it was in the olden days. But this is also true of rivers. They don’t flow effortlessly through a landscape. They are just a moment in the water cycle, whose vagaries are poorly understood. Don’t count too much on glaciers, either; they have entered the furious path of history. Plants? Don’t bet on their local origin. To follow any one of them, you will be led to complex geopolitics and you might have to visit most of the world. Microbes and viruses? They have mutated so much because of medicine that it is hard to decide, between bugs or boards of directors, which one is more threatening.11 So, you see that if anyone wishes to defend his or her land and to be deeply in his or her territory, then many more foreign participants have to be included to compose the identity of the place. That’s actually how the Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM | Karlsruhe is being designed and the publication laid out: one after the other, bona fide members of the natural world are given a barely recognizable shape. Well, isn’t this the price to pay if you want to promote grassroots politics? At a more speculative level, landing on Earth requires a different view of the material world than has been framed, delineated, and entrenched since the modern period (see Schaffer, “On the Difficulty of Animating the Earth,” this volume, xxx–xxx). Materiality appears to be way more complex than the rather ideal notion of matter and space imagined earlier. In this book, in addition to the concept of the Critical Zone we offer two more concepts to make sense of that shift: Gaia and the Terrestrial. One way to explore earthly politics is to say that we are expelled from nature and pushed toward Gaia (see Lenton and Dutreuil, this volume, xxx–xxx and xxx–xxx). However, Gaia is not taken here to be the popular idea that “the Earth taken as a whole is alive,” but rather as the occasion to redefine what both life and whole could signify. When biologists think of life, they think of organisms. But Gaia is not a big organism. It is Life, with a capital "L", that, to be sure, includes as some of its copartners

11 Hannah Landecker, “Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History,” Body and Society 22, no. 4 (2016): 19–52.

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7

is a complete puzzle. The shift in the conception of mateanimals, plants, bacteria, but also many other participants not usually counted in its balance sheet — atmosphere, riality requires another understanding of what it is to have a body — and, as a consequence, what it could possibly soil, rocks, seas, clouds, minerals, continents — that have been transformed, mobilized, generated, inhabited, engi- mean today to imagine a Body Politic (see de Vries, this neered by life forms over eons of time. That is, all the in- volume, xxx–xxx). Laws of nature are up for grabs again. gredients that make up the Critical Zone as well as those An assembly of “holobionts” won’t resemble an assembly disputed territories claimed by some people as “theirs” of individual organisms (see Flower, this volume, xxx–xxx). The call isn’t the same, nor will the result be. (see Dutreuil, this volume, xxx–xxx). So, yes, we can’t avoid it: wishing to land on Earth inThink of it: No other habitat has ever been experienced stead of expanding globally requires taking seriously why except Gaia. To live in Gaia cannot mean the same thing so many people are tempted by reactionary politics. The as to be humans living in nature. Gaia is a sui generis project is indeed to focus again on people and land, but phenomenon, not only in the usual sense of being unique — at least until another exemplar is found — but in the lit- also to be prepared for a complete reassessment of the eral sense of having generated itself against all odds and, composition of soil and of people. more importantly, without any superior model or direction. And yet it ended up with some sort of self-regulation. The “WELL, THIS IS FOR SURE A HIGHFALUTIN’ PROJmore you dive into the originality of Gaia, the more you ECT… HOW CAN YOU IMAGINE FOR ONE SECOND might devise original forms of politics that are also “with- THAT IT COULD FIT INSIDE A SHOW AND UNDER out superior model and direction” (see Coccia, this vol- THE ROOF OF AN ART INSTITUTION – OF ALL ume, xxx–xxx). As for self-regulation? Well, it’s literally a PLACES! — WITH, FOR GOOD MEASURE, A LOT OF WORKS OF ART THROWN IN?” work in progress.12 To live at the time of the Anthropocene cannot possibly put the same demands on humans as to live in the Being limited is exactly what we strive for! We wish to Holocene. This is why, if the Earth on which to land is so squeeze the visitors into the museum, to make them exdifferent from the Globe imagined earlier, it’s even more perience their entry inside the Critical Zone, with no way remote from the heavily fortified domains to which so to escape and no way to simplify their entanglements with many people are tempted to retire. other beings (see Haraway, this volume, xxx–xxx). Isn’t the If Gaia is such an original concept, it’s because it was narrow space of a museum ideal to give an inkling of ancodeveloped by two scientists who took the question of other politics of limited space? Let’s take the show and what is a whole and what is a part, at opposite ends: this publication as tutorials for rehearsing future landings. James Lovelock from the big and Lynn Margulis from the An exhibition offers a perfect scale model to test idesmall. The small — the bacteria — holds the big — the at- as which, as you said, are much too vast to be treated mosphere — while the big also resides inside the small. head on. It’s a good habit to consider that exhibitions ofTheir discovery made it impossible to retain the Russian fer an equivalent of what scientists call a “thought experdolls models that earlier allowed us to move up and down iment”: when you cannot test a theory because it is too the scale. We use “Terrestrial” as a code word to un- farfetched, you test it in your head and intuit — or somederline such a shift. Its most relevant trait is that it’s not times discover! — what the result could be. Similarly, if made of entities sitting next to one another and then en- it’s totally mad to pretend to land on Earth, a Gedanktering into some sort of relation, be it competitive or co- enausstellung, or “thought exhibition,” provides the ocoperative (see Stengers, this volume, xxx–xxx). To begin casion to test ideas that are impossible to experience at with, bacteria, animals, and plants are not easily divided scale one. into chunks or units. What is a part and what is a whole In a quieter period, it might make sense for scientists is everywhere thrown into doubt: cells, societies, as well to reject the collaboration of artists, or to limit their help to as climates. decoration and popularization. Not in a time of crisis such This new metric transforms what it means to have as that of the newly moving Earth. In these periods, what an identity, to belong to a place, to share competenc- is true of the impossible divide between science and poles with other beings, to be entangled with other “com- itics is even truer of their divide with the art worlds. Faced panion species” — indeed, what it is to be animated and with the task of landing on terra incognita, we realize how what it is to be an animal (see Despret, this volume, xxx– little equipped we are to cope with its novelties. We don’t xxx). As to what it means to own some piece of land, that have the right imagination nor the psychological makeup

12 Timothy M. Lenton and Bruno Latour, “Gaia 2.0,” Science 361, no. 6407 (September 14, 2018): 1066–68.

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to metabolize the flood of terrifying news pouring in every day. How to cultivate emotional resources without the arts? Changes in cosmology cannot be registered without changes in representation — in all tenors of the word (see Hache, this volume, xxx–xxx). The proof that we lack even the simplest visualizing tools is that if we portray the Critical Zone by projecting it onto the Blue Planet, it becomes so thin as to be invisible!13 As soon as we wish to represent what it could mean for organisms to be entangled with one another, we are at a loss. So today, much as in other earth-shaking periods, we need aesthetics, defined as what renders one sensitive to the existence of other ways of life. Just as politicians are supposed to hear voices previously unheard and scientists to become attuned to phenomena so far invisible, artists are challenged to render us sensitive to the shape of things to come. In this volume, as well as in the exhibition, what could be called those three forms of aesthetics are meant to mix quite extensively (see Aït-Touati, this volume, xxx–xxx). One choice for the book’s layout is to play with Alexander von Humboldt’s style and his innovations in data visualization as well as his extensive use of storytelling (see Walls, this volume, xxx–xxx, and Koerner, “Nature Painting,” xxx–xxx). We chose Humboldt not only because of the celebration of his birth 250 years ago in 2019, but because we feel that his work marks the beginning of the same historical arc of which our exhibition signals the crepuscule. When Humboldt surveyed the land to be known, conquered, and mapped, the Globe was still very much an ideal horizon with none of the later conceptions of matter yet fully entrenched. The Earth, so to speak, was not yet globalized. Today, fortunately, it’s being in many ways de-globalized. One has only to read Humboldt’s and Bonpland's Naturgemälde (1805; ,see this volume, xx–xx and xxx–xxx) to see that, although he was obsessed with measurements — gravity, magnetism, temperature, altitude, and so on — his cherished sets of data extracted at great pains remained isolated spots in the middle of a landscape that had to be described through the use of many other resources — stories, logbooks, paintings, memoirs of all sorts and styles. His world was still heterogeneous, pock-marked by yawning gaps in understanding. In his times, there was no GPS to smooth all discontinuities to give the appearance of one single metrics. Humboldt did not hide the discontinuities in a landscape he had to appropriate through great hardship, by actually going there on foot or carriage. Strangely, but for exactly opposite reasons, this is just the situation, two hundred years later,

that’s revealed today by Critical Zone Observatories (see Brantley, this volume, xxx–xxx): heterogeneous, discontinuous, a leopard skin of data separated by large spans of ignorance, in the middle of fierce battles that thwart any simple dream of domination. Once again, no shortcut allowed. This is why, in each chapter, shorter pieces, by many different authors, are trying to multiply the access to the many particularities of the Critical Zones. Heterogeneity is the rule. Politics is not about searching for a unifying view, but about dispersion so as to explore as many sites and possibilities as possible. We aren’t deluded. The only thing curators can expect to offer is to add another episode to the long history of orientation maps, to “cosmograms” (see Tresch, this volume, xxx–xxx), thus revising earlier narratives, and allowing visitors and readers to articulate better ones (see Weibel, this volume, xxx–xxx). In brief, a show with a catalog… The book begins with the disorientation in time, space, and agency — When, where, and who are the modernizing humans supposed to be situated once the moving Earth has been taken into account? It then locates such disorientation in the disconnection between two different definitions of the land which modernizing humans are supposed to inhabit: the land we live in, and the land we live from. The result of this disconnection is that they are suspended in midair. Hence the necessity of laying out the shape of the land which, at some point, they will have to inhabit. The great surprise is that such a land does not resemble the globe nor nature as imagined during the modern parenthesis. It’s redescribed here as Critical Zones, as Gaia, and as being made of a completely different set of features that are defining, provisionally, the Terrestrial. The great tragedy of the present situation is that there is no agreed-upon definition of which planet we’re supposed to inhabit in common. Hence, division and war go to the heart of all definitions of politics. Because of those “wars of worlds,” it is of great urgency that we develop skills to describe how readers and visitors situate themselves in those conflicts in order to choose their fights. A thought exhibition cannot do more than open a fictional space to explore life in the Critical Zone with the help of the various art forms and to let readers or visitors reside in a state of suspension.

13 Frédérique Ait-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire, Terra Forma: Manuel de cartographies potentielles (Paris: B42, 2019).

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I.

1

Disorientation

2

Orra White Hitchcock, Drawing of slate, Devonshire, England, 1828–40. Pen and ink on linen, 22 × 69 cm.

DISORIENTATION Fear might be the best way to begin this section. This is at least the suggestion of Dipesh Chakrabarty in his interview: “I grew up in a place where fear was very much still a part of my life. Something about that reverence has to be brought back to supplement our very Aristotelian sense of wonderment …”

12

Chakrabarty has been one of the first to convince histori- the layout for this volume allows. Witness the care with ans — meaning historians of human adventures — to pay which an artist like Sonia Levy follows the work of oceanattention to the disorientation induced by the introduc- ographers and biologists as they accompany and maybe preserve (or at least learn as many lessons as possible tion of coal and gas into the rhythm of social and world history. Everything happens as if the global — what mo- from) the threatened corals gathered in the basement of a Museum in London. It is every component of the former dernity was supposed to deliver on the surface of the planet — is entering into conflict with what Chakrabar- nature that has to be taken care of. The same puzzlement has moved Robert Boschman ty calls the “planetary” — that is, the same planet once dreamed of, except now it appears concrete, material, to explore the archeology of our only real predecessors, reacting to human actions, and above all, limiting glob- those hunter-gatherers living 12,000 years ago, who within only a few generations had to adjust to massive al development. climate change. The Young Dryas episodes narrated by Everybody nowadays is aware of the name geologists have given to this disorientation: the Anthropocene. No- Boschman offer a meditation on how to cope with a masbody has done more to make the discipline of stratig- sive disorientation in the order of the universe. Except our raphy known to the general public than Jan Zalasiewicz. European ancestors might have been nimbler in shifting their ways of life than we modern humans are; prisoners The study group that he has assembled and guided has provided a scale for measuring the magnitude of human of our mammoth technosphere. To order the universe is precisely what becomes difintervention into geological history that had not been realized before. And, indeed, “in the Anthropocene, almost ficult in a time such as ours. According to John Tresch, everything becomes geology” (Jan Zalasiewicz). Hence “cosmograms” are objects, stories, images, and narratives that capture the spirit of a time or a new situation the sad beauty of Zalasiewicz’s summary of this human for which there is no received name. Just what we need intervention, a picture achieved by reducing some of the geological data to a one-meter measure. How odd to re- when the whole machinery of time is getting out of joint. alize that the biomass, according to this metric, is just Cosmograms order the world just at the moment when there is no order. “What do they do — how do they profive kilos per square meter, whereas the stuff humans pose, institute, challenge, satirize, critique, prop up, or have been able to produce — rubble, ruins, soil and all quietly reinforce an order of the universe?” When Tresch — weighs as much as fifty kilos! We knew “man was the quotes Elisée Reclus’s “Humanity is nature becoming measure of all things,” but we did not know the surprising length of that measuring stick. And to learn that the col- aware of itself,” we take stock of the distance between the optimism of geography in the nineteenth century and lective pressure of human activity is comparable only to asteroids at the end of Cretaceous or giant volcanoes at this more recent slogan of the activists in France today: the end of the Permian, does not make the measure any “We’re not defending nature, we are nature defending itself.” Human consciousness is what seems to be in short less distressing. After all, volcanoes too have been dragged into our supply today. In times of uncertainty the crucial question is to deculture, as Karen Holmberg argues, but it’s not reassuring that humans have become volcanoes themselves, es- cide whether we are able to tell the right story, and this time not to build a world of fiction but to have an imaginapecially as their kind of industrial eruption works 24 hours tion realistic enough to follow what the real world is made a day, 365 days a year. No wonder that the word Anthropocene has metas- of and how; that is, what’s the story the world itself tells. tasized to the point that Clémence Hallé and Anne-So- A problem that Richard Powers, the great American novphie Milon can refer to “the Infinity of the Anthropocene.” elist, has done more than anyone else to solve practically, The news is so disorienting that every discipline, every in- by writing stories as they are: “And like it or not, the man terest group offers an alternative term, insisting on this or and his measurements and the mountain and the neighthat other variable, in order to cope with the maelstrom. bors and the forest and all that story’s readers are all a part of it.” That’s actually the good thing about this new geological label: it has spread everywhere and yet it is impossible to settle quietly “in” the historical period it designates. It is actually one of the characteristics of the present that this disorientation can be observed in many different sites and at very different scales — which is what

13

When the Global Reveals the Planetary: Bruno Latour Interviews Dipesh Chakrabarty Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty

BR U NO L AT OU R

I want to ask you about how to orient ourselves among the planetary conflicts. Actually, there are many different notions of the planet according to you, different ways to feel or become conscious of the planetary dimension of politics. So, I’d like to ask you first about the views associated with the current conservative revolution, and whenever we mention this term a few minutes later Heidegger comes in. How would you define this type of Earth, which could be called the Old Earth or the Reactionary Earth, for then we will be in a better position to locate the others vis à vis what you call “the Emergence of the Planetary.”

Heuristically, to simplify the story, if I start with the history of labor and capitalism and connect Earth and planet to that, then you will see that in most European languages labor, etymologically, has to do with toil. It’s really the physical, wearisome labor of a physical body. It could be a horse. It could be a child. The German word arbeiten is etymologically related to the Indo-European word for the (hardworking) “orphan.” When Karl Marx is analyzing capitalism, his critical equation is between the machine and man, and even animals. In the first volume of Capital, he describes how some of the heavy machines were incorporating movements of a horse’s legs, and then incorporating movements of human arms and other body parts.1 That’s why Marx says, quoting Goethe, that the machine is robbing the worker of his body. The word “work,” however, is etymologically connected to the word for energy in Greek. This is the seventeenth-century Newtonian definition of “work” — it is energy spent. I think capitalism begins its history with labor as toil. But it discovers, with the development of technology, that it does not need bodily labor to get work done. It can get work done by a waterfall. It can get work done by wind. It can get work done by a machine, by artificial intelligence. The domain of work is what expands under capitalism. In the last few decades with the use of AI, we can see that the future of work that was labor/toil is uncertain. This is giving rise to debates about a universal basic income. What will you do with the people who will not have paid employment? Only some people will have labor that is paid work. As work expands, the reach of capital expands, and our demand on the biosphere expands. This

DIPESH CHAKR ABARTY D C

1 See chapter 15 “Machinery and Modern Industry,” in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Book 1 The Process of Production of Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 492—639. Originally published in German as Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1867).

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directly effects the biosphere, and it effects Deep Earth because of resource mobilization.

BL

BL

The extraction of things.

DC That’s right. Extractive capitalism becomes more and more

dependent upon the biosphere. The more capitalism gets into Deep Earth through the realm of work, the more it encounters what I call the planet. BL

Is biosphere a good term here?

DC The

biosphere is part of the Critical Zone. So, capitalism is making more demands on the Critical Zone, as well as on Deep Earth.

So it’s labor that allows us to discover the planet? Or is it its fabulous extension through capitalism? DC It’s really the reduction in the importance of labor and the increasing importance of work. This is what makes Marx somewhat obsolete because all of his notions of value, abstract labor, living labor, are based on the presence of human beings, whereas work does not require human presence to the same degree. I can make a mountain do the work for me. This is really the principle of leverage. As capitalism expands it creates a crisis here. The crisis is often what we call in sociology the problem of the future of work. When they say what will happen to the future of work, they mean the future of labor. But capitalism expands, creating this crisis and it actually increases the geomorphological role of humans. That is, the way in which we terraform the surface of the planet. The fact that in the Anthropocene they say human beings are the biggest earthmoving agents — BL

BL

Wait! You’re going too fast. We haven’t seen the Anthropocene yet; so far, we just have a guy toiling in a field —

DC Becoming redundant — BL

There is no “planet” yet.

DC So, we

begin with Heideggerian Earth, and we begin with

the eighteenth-century discovery of soil chemistry, and the notion of sustainability. This is where one level of capitalism is beginning. What one is introducing is the history of what we call technology —

The global comes from a historical process that includes European expansion and the development of a technology that can connect the sphere we live on into a globe for us. BL

BL

Production basically — Carl Schmitt’s terms, this is what he calls in English the story of “unencumbered technology” in that book you referred me to.2 Amazing, yes? He sees the ship as unencumbered technology because life on a ship depends completely on technology in the ship. This technology, in his terms, in unencumbered because it is not embedded in society as technology on land may be. But technology increasingly gets even more unencumbered, and the more unencumbered technology gets the more you can expand the realm of work.

Yeah. Without the global we would not have discovered the planetary. And then the planetary retrospectively, covers billions of years.

DC But, in

DC Exactly. That’s where the historical vista opens up. BL

So, the planet is antecedent to the global.

DC Right. BL

Except it arrives very late, of course.

DC Yes. It comes late. BL

Until you find that the biosphere has a limit. BL

at the same time, this allows you to come across Deep Earth, which is part of what I am calling the planet. Work on this level can lead to more earthquakes. Consider this: the use of fossil fuels results in the emission of CO2. To find fossil fuels, you have to dig deep and need sophisticated technology and machinery to get the work done. The heating of the surface of the planet contributes to geological events like earthquakes and tsunamis. There is a book called Waking the Giant by the geologist Bill McGuire, its subtitle is: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes.3

Okay.

DC Yes, but

BL

DC What

I was going to say here is this: I have two photos (see figs. 1 and 2) — I haven’t got them with me, but they are very telling — I juxtaposed two photos of a child in my neighbourhood, a four-year-old boy walking past an earthmoving machine with no self-awareness, and the next minute sitting in a sand pit playing with miniature earthmoving machines, moving sand. I use these images to say that the Anthropocene, or humankind’s earthmoving agency, has been naturalized to a degree that a little boy is growing up using this toy machinery, thinking that this is what humans do. In that sense a planetary role of humans can actually show up in an individual’s life, their biography. This child is a colleague’s child. One day I walked into their house and saw these toys. I exclaimed to my colleague, “These are Anthropocene toys!” So my colleague, this child’s father, became interested in the issue, and sent me these photos.

Is this the movement to the global?

DC This is where the planetary comes into the global. BL

Okay. Because you said the global reveals the planetary.

DC The global discloses the planetary. BL

BL

Could we get some dates on that?

DC I would say, the “Earth” in Heideggerian terms is older. BL

In its primordial range.

But wait, when this kid is playing it was very positive. Today we might come to a situation when you have the same earthmoving toys, but ecologically minded parents might slap kids round the face and say, “Don’t play with those horrible things!”

DC Because we did not call them Anthropocene toys. We called

them development toys. DC Yes. The global from the fifteenth century onward. I would

say that the planetary begins with nitrogen fixing, the Haber-Bosch process, at the beginning of the twentieth century, because you are actually getting into planetary processes. Of course, the planetary is what the Earth comes from.

BL

When does the word designate or shift from development to Anthropocene? When does the Great Acceleration, in2 Carl Schmitt, Dialogues on Power and Space, ed. Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein, trans. Samstead of being positive, uel Garrett Zeitlin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). become horrifying? Originally published in German as Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1954). 3 Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

15

DC I would say it begins — the awareness (not to be Hegelian

about it) — so to talk about beginning of an awareness is not the right term, but surely from Rachel Carson4 to The Limits to Growth,5 so 1962 to 1972. It’s in that decade that a certain shift happens. The shift does not reach Asia. China actually launches the “Four Modernization” movements in 1978. India liberalizes in 1991 and thinks it’s modernizing. The shift is mostly in the West, but I would say that’s when there are real doubts. The kind of real fight that Rachel Carson had to carry on against the authorities for not being a proper scientist. BL

So, the planetary emerges as the feeling that there is a clash between the global — basically modernization — and the planet. It’s very differentiated in terms of history with every nation being different ...

BL

So, The Green Revolution?

DC Well that’s later: 1978 or 1979, but even in the 1950s, dams

for instance. The justification of dams was to feed people. From the 1930s, population specialists are meeting to ask if there’s enough food. Is Earth’s carrying capacity enough? One of the interesting things I see is that the modernization narrative carries with it a certain kind of secular ethic — it’s a secular and nonreligious way of caring for the poor. The rhetoric that this will eventually feed people is there both in what right-wing and in left-wing people write. BL

So here there is a beginning of a type of planet at least, it’s not yet the planetary— we reserve “The Planetary” for the Anthropocene?

DC Yeah. DC More

differentiated than globalization, because the development story runs concurrently with imperialism. The empires say they are developing you. Rostow’s stages of growth in the 1950s, specifically 1958. I grew up in India thinking we are organizing development/modernization. To modernize was our ambition. If you go back to the 1950s, the popular defense of technology such as big dams was in terms of providing food and feeding people.

BL

There is already the feeling of a planet here, but it’s a planet as a background and a resource.

DC Right. BL

And the question is “how big is the resource?”

DC And that’s how the limit question arises. So, the finitude 4 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

question —

5 Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

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BRUNO LATOUR AND DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

BL

It’s still in development. It’s still the global. So, the global has a planet —

BL

You have been infected —

DC You have a microbiome; there are other living things in you. DC The global is shadowed by its own planet. BL

In a way, this is the world that you [BL] and others laid out, which is a world of connectivity and what you call distributed forms of agency. The world that you people have talked about, that world was actually increasingly becoming visible, but political institutions, legal institutions were carrying on —

And then suddenly in the 1970s/1980s in the western part the planet is felt both as a resource and that the planetary is somewhat negative or puzzling.

DC It was revealing itself among James Lovelock and people in

BL

With Lockean subjects —

the 1960s but we were not aware of it. DC As though that knowledge was not of any political relevance. BL

But the connection with Gaia, according to you, is not as strong as with Earth System Science [ESS].

DC This is what it mutates into. BL

And then there is a conflict between the two. But I want to go back to one of the other traits of the different planetary definitions and that is the question of agency because, after all, this is from where you started your interest in the climate issue. Clearly the agent history pushing the global was industry.

I think that is the problem we are now facing on a much more increased scale. BL

So, we no longer have Lockean subjects anywhere?

DC But

we have to pretend that we are still Lockean subjects. That’s how we vote. That’s how nations talk to each other. In the United Nations every nation has a legal, political personality. When we say big nations are responsible, or when we say capitalism is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, we speak of capitalism as if it had a moral/legal personality.

DC And for Marx, labor. BL BL

And, of course, that’s what provided the possibility of socialism. I am sorry — this is a question which you have answered many times: What is the new agent of history now with the planetary? Who is the agent? Is this an agent that is recognizable from the history of socialism? Is it a completely new type of human?

DC My

understanding of the situation is as follows: From the 1970s on something was happening to the figure of the “agent” — every human being as an autonomous agent — which had been so popular in the democratizing, post-imperial West of the 1960s. Increasingly, Western complex societies were dealing with the question of agency by compartmentalizing it in different spheres of life. If you were involved in something that could be treated by law, where you would be held responsible or culpable for something, then most law would still use a Lockean notion of personhood. You would be seen as a person with autonomy, you could be held accountable. If you had mental insanity, then you would be forgiven. On the other hand, when doctors discovered that an ulcer was caused by bacteria and not stress, which was late in the 1970s/1980s, a doctor treating you would not treat you as a Lockean person. The doctor would actually say —

WHEN THE GLOBAL REVEALS THE PLANETARY

So, there is a disconnect between the recognized agents of the past and the new agents of the planetary?

DC Well, there is a real disconnect — and we don’t yet have po-

litical bridges to connect the divide. BL

So, the agent of history is not a human but “earthbounds.”

DC They

are earthbound, they are more-than-human, and political thought has not tried to build any links between humans and these larger complexes of which humans are also a part. We don’t yet know how to politically recognize this agent that is more than human and necessarily includes the human.

BL

Would you be comfortable with the adjective “terrestrial”?

DC Yes.

Not a Lockean subject but terrestrial, an adjective that doesn’t specify if they are human or not human. DC Exactly. But to view those as subjects — BL

BL

They are not there.

17

DC They

are not there, and you have to resignify the word subject.

BL

Maybe we can now go through the different things with this argument about agency. The Earth, the primordial Earth which has obsessed Husserl, Heidegger, and in some way Schmitt and many other Germans, what would have been the human agent there? What would have been the political construction — the agent of history?

chemotherapy, you are not saying that. So that’s why I read into that desire to keep that element from the constitution. BL

DC Yes, let

me finish this point and then I will come to it. So here is the paradox of human political thought — and I’ll try to say it in a sentence. Political thought from the seventeenth century is founded in the assumption that the rule of the state is to provide security of life and property, but in search of making greater numbers of people live safer lives for much longer than previously, we have actually made life more uncertain. The pursuit of that safety has produced now a zone, a very unsafe zone, for human beings. At the same time, the commitment at the level of individual life is built into the goals of all our institutions. If my wife has cancer, I have cancer, we go to the hospital. We are all committed to extending every individual’s life, and, as I said, because political thought from the very beginning made the individual the focus, the bearer of life and rights and the recipient of welfare, this focus on the individual meant that there was an indifference to the total number of humans. Irrespective of how many humans there are, we will say all of them must have the same rights. So basically there is an indifference to the biosphere built into political thought.

DC Heidegger, if you just remember in some sentences — I for-

get which essay — where he is comparing, where he develops his distinction between two modes of relating to the Earth: demanding from the Earth — the German word is herausfordern — and leaving something to the mercy of the Earth. He says when a peasant sows a seed, he is leaving it to the mercy of the Earth, but when I use artificial fertilizers I work the land hard. It is as though I was being demanding of the Earth, like holding a gun to somebody’s head to rob them. Heidegger clearly favors the position of leaving yourself at the mercy of the Earth. BL

But there is an earthiness in your definition of the planetary.

Which is not so very far from the agent who lives in the planetary after many Hegelian twists and turns.

DC Yes, that is very interesting though I had not quite thought

of it that way. The agent here discovers that he/she is at the mercy of the planet anyway, with the difference that the kind of mutuality that Heidegger and others assumed existed between the Earth and humans does not quite exist between the planet and us. The Earth, in Heidegger’s terms, has mercy; the planet is indifferent. BL

So that is your point for you when you are accused of having abandoned the revolutionary emancipatory agent of history and when you are talking so much about the new planetary, I mean does it mean that you sort of…?

DC Here is the problem that I find myself pondering, and I have

to think my way through it. When you say, “we have never been modern,” you are right in your own terms, in the way you define the constitution of modern. In that sense you are right. But when you finish the book you end with saying you want to keep two things from the constitution of the moderns. One of which is the proliferation of hybrids that humans have produced and that capacity to proliferate hybrids. In other words, even when you are finishing that book — and you are saying we have never been modern in your own terms, which I think is right — you are not saying we should not have MRI machines, should not have

18

BL

It was the logical way of thinking until the global —

DC Until the global ran into the planet. BL

Because when most of the people were promoting the idea of modernization for everybody, everybody abandons it.

DC That’s

the conservative revolution. So, here is the dilemma then: I think it’s very hard now to build a new idea of politics that does not start from the same premise of security of life. Because I think we are all committed to it.

BL

We want to be protected and defended and secured.

DC Exactly.

And even in Heidegger’s understanding of what heimlich, what “home” is, we’ll always find that being at home also has to do with feeling safe. But at the same time the problem is that the present arrangement of things that we thought would make us safe actually makes things unsafe for us. So how do we then bring together political thought and the kind of writings that you and Jane Bennet and others, the so-called “new materialists,” have done, this is the task that is open. I don’t think we know yet — and this is where I find reading your introduction to the

BRUNO LATOUR AND DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

catalogue interesting because you’re also leaving it open. You’re saying, I can’t define your critical zone for you. It’s for you to find out. BL

DC In

a way, this question that you are asking — what would be the form of politics— it is not a question being asked in a nowhere space, it is actually being asked in a world in which there are powerful people with money and powerful institutions. There is, for instance, the Harvard physicist David Keith who has written a book in support of geoengineering, and who has been given substantial funding from the Gates Foundation for the development of the technology that would enable us to spread aerosol sulphates in the stratosphere. But as a geologist has pointed out: If you spread aerosol sulphates, and you have to keep spreading them for 100 years to get some breathing space, and for those 100 years the sky will be permanently white because of scattered light!

You must have an idea what it could mean to be no longer a Lockean human, but an earthbound, or terrestrial human still interested in protection by some sort of entity we might not want to call the state. We don’t know yet.

DC What is the actual shape of the human-to-be, we don’t know.

And we also have to make an assumption that for every broad agreement that human beings come to, there will be so many interpretations of that agreement that the agreement will fray as soon as we’ve come to it, which is Schmitt’s point about the pluriverse. I cannot produce a description of the futures humans will come to inhabit, but I do feel that the socio-economic-technological arrangements we currently have cannot go on indefinitely. Late capitalism has become antipolitical because it cannot provide protection for everybody, and therefore there has to be some kind of recognition of the planetary processes of ESS. Now we come back to Gaia, Critical Zone, and the question of recognizing these variables.

BL

So, in your definition, this is just the global.

DC This is Gaia extension — BL

Which swallow the planetary under the same terms. And it doesn’t give any political agency except towards people. It doesn’t repoliticize the situation very much.

DC It doesn’t. But on the other hand, there has to be a struggle.

One way of asking the question again is to ask which one of those planetary views carries the possibility of politics. This is, of course, one of the questions you have worked with a lot, which is: The global had a powerful way of attributing a political agency and directions which was development — either capitalism or communism — but it was orienting nonetheless. We knew what to do politically and what it meant to be indignant and build political platforms and fight for them. The Earth, the primordial Earth we talked about in the beginning very quickly turned reactionary because it was not organized as a resistance to capitalism but as a sort of dream of getting away from it. So now suddenly the global reveals the planetary; there are things that are clearly not political. The ESS — which is a planet, it’s just one among many planets and we study them compared to the rest of the cosmos, which means you can’t do much politically with it.

But what I am saying is that in many ways, because, money/ capital is already producing a politics of the planet in terms of extending this logic —

BL

BL

DC No. Not

at all. Not at all. But I think the negative part of the current progressive politics is to fight all of this. There are two interesting things in addition — things we didn’t talk about. Think of the time when the news of climate change became news for politicians as distinct from scientists, for example, in 1988 when NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate committee on human-driven global warming, and soon after, in the same year, the UN set up the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. Why did they set up IPCC? They set it up following the success of the Montreal protocol. So, what happened is that we assumed — this is not the political part of the story — we assumed after the Second World War that the United Nations was the proper form —

DC But I think the political follows from the planetary because

there is already a conservative right-wing construction of planetary politics around. BL Yes, of course. Sorry. I forgot that. It’s not reactionary in the Earth, the primordial Earth, sense. It’s reactionary in the hyper modernist sense, direction, to go on global all the way to the planet.

Politics in terms of power distribution. But in terms of agent having — to be empowered, to do something of their own existence, no.

BL

Right, business as usual —

DC —

WHEN THE GLOBAL REVEALS THE PLANETARY

for dealing with all global politics and the United

19

Nations also assumed that the calendar for working on global politics is infinite. BL

DC And you actually bring in Fernand Braudel here — Braudel

is fascinating because he has a complete lack of faith in the individual as the agent of history. In his book On History, he actually says that the individual “is all too often a mere abstraction.” 6 There are all these big things, but the big things are all very stable. But they are not.

So, when you say global you mean global politics absorbing the planetary as it arrived, at the time?

DC Yeah, but

what I am saying is that the assumption of the UN, like for instance with the Israel/Palestine question, is that there is not a finite calendar in politics. But when the climate crisis broke, it was a clash of two kinds of calendars because the scientists were producing a finite calendar, basically saying if you don’t do x by this time, then the consequences will be y. Even the 2°C temperature rise figure, as you know, was a politically negotiated figure of a finite calendar. The climate problem was a problem for which there was actually no governance model. The UN was not a governance institution meant for dealing with planetary problems. It gave us a governance model for global problems. The climate problem was for the second planetary problem, the first one being the hole in the ozone layer that we dealt with within the parameters of UN processes —

BL

BL

DC Exactly. That is how he seems to have thought. And it did not

matter for humans. Recently, I was thinking that you could go and read all the aphorisms of Wittgenstein in On Certainty as actually his way to think about what is it that human beings take for granted. One question he asks, if you remember, is this: If you see a building, you ask how old is it, but if you see a mountain,you never ask how old the mountain is.Why? BL

that’s because the mountain is part of the givenness of the world. But today, reading about the glaciers and climate crisis in South Asia, you realize that the Himalayas are a young mountain range. Australian coal is close to the surface because the mountains are all old and eroded. Our “certainties” are now being shaken up by what I call the percolation of a geological consciousness into our sense of history. That’s the tectonic shift happening in history.

DC It

BL

In the characteristic of your planetary we have to factor in the rhythm of history. So, the primordial Earth by definition is always the same, the same village, church bell, there is no history — of the global we know the rhythm: it had to move forward, and we had this expression which sounds strange today “the acceleration of history” —

That’s strange.

DC And

So, for you, when did the planetary emerge even inside the UN format as the impossible to solve question? Is it just because of the inefficiency?

emerges very gradually, and it shows up very clearly in the Paris Climate Deal of 2015 where the assumption is that even if everybody met their targets, we would not be able to avoid dangerous climate change unless we produced technology for drawing down greenhouse gases from the air, the technology for which doesn’t yet exist. You begin to see that all the nations are trying to act as if they were still on the same global calendar. I can bargain for time here, and some time there. This actually shows that there is a deep crisis of governance. The climate crisis has brought the planet into view, but we don’t have a planetary form of governance. Geoengineering and all of these things are taking the place of that politics. On the ground there is already an argument for not mounting global, but local, heterogenous, multifarious forms of resistance to actions based on the “good Anthropocene” argument.

So the acceleration of history is for geology but not for —

BL

But we have been working a lot on that and the question I am trying to ask in addition to it is which one is superseding the others?

DC The global and the planet? BL

Well, clearly the global, if we follow your argument about the geoengineering being the global trying to absorb the planetary.

DC Same for solar energy. Same thing. It’s trying to absorb the

planetary into the global. BL

And then there are other versions which I would call more the Gaia line, which is to say we cannot — the planetary has always been there, and it is unique. It has a uniqueness to it, so ESS is the same everywhere —

DC Gaia is ours. It’s unique. BL

Gaia is singular. We dive into its singularity more and more.

DC This is very interesting. You are opposing it to astrobiology

6 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 10. Originally published in French as Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969).

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BRUNO LATOUR AND DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

and the search for exoplanets. The assumption in astrobiology is that we are not singular. That there will be a series one day. And every Gaia will be uniquely bizarre. The planets will be similar, but if there is even life on another planet it’s Gaia will be uniquely bizarre. BL

The argument of Timothy Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil is that looking for life on other planets is one thing, but looking for Gaia is an absurdity. It is another way to ask the question about the normativity because if we begin to feel that and are interested in the historicity, we learn a new historicity which the global didn’t have. This historicity asks to give us also some sort of normativity. It’s no longer like what it was when we were supposed to be natural because when we were supposed to be natural…

DC I

accept the description, that is why in discussing Gaia and ESS, I actually say ESS is haunted by a poetic intuition, the moment of Gaia. Maybe that is the reason why Lenton and you bring Gaia back in. The point about its singularity is precisely the point about its poetry —

BL

It’s not nature —

DC It’s

all this poetry. It’s not an object of science that repeats itself. In that sense, it is about singularity. The problem is when we as human beings learn about it, and there’s no question that there is a sense of the miraculous in knowing about — I mean that this planet has supported, for 1/8th of its life, this sudden explosion of life forms and there is something miraculous about it. I think that’s why it goes back to your Facing Gaia lectures. It’s very hard to keep that moment of sensing a miracle from some sense of the religious. In my last chapter I make a distinction between

wonderment and reverence. I found a geologist who says that humans have lost a sense of reverence for the planet. The Latin root of reverence suggests that it means respect with fear, some kind of a feeling that this is much bigger than I am. I have been reading Rudolf Otto on this question. BL

We are back to a very old idea of nature being terrifying.

DC When

I was growing up in Calcutta — this so-called modern city, the British had built it, but it was already 250 years old when I was born. In my childhood, I was still scared of wild animals in the city — foxes, snakes. As I grew up, the foxes went, the snakes went, the weird frogs — they all went, and today’s child is not fearful of wild animals. I opened Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the first sentence says a major aim of the Enlightenment was to help humans overcome fear.7 I became very interested in the question of when does political thought incorporate into itself this overcoming of fear, I was reading Hobbes’s De Cive, which is from 1642, and I realized Hobbes included wild animals in the state of nature. For a historian there is, then, this one task. I agree that modernity has been about overcoming fears of all kinds. We can recall it in a nostalgic way, but as historians we can also write the history of how we came to overcome different kinds of fear because it didn’t happen all over the world at the same time. I grew up in a place where fear was very much still a part of my life. Something about that reverence has to be brought back to supplement our very Aristotelian sense of wonderment at the miracle of biodiversity.

7 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). Originally published in German as Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947).

WHEN THE GLOBAL REVEALS THE PLANETARY

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A

For the Love of Corals: Life In the Ruins of the Museum 1

Sonia Levy BEHIND -THE - SCENES, in the basement of the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, a team of marine biologists and aquarists led by Jamie Craggs have initiated Project Coral, a leading endeavor to breed corals ex situ in specially designed tanks. By mirroring the climatic conditions — seasonal temperature changes, solar irradiance and, last but not least, lunar cycles — of the Great Barrier Reef within custom-built mesocosms, the team has become the first in the world to induce corals to spawn in a laboratory. Research is also underway to elaborate methods to increase the survivorship of juvenile corals during their delicate embryonic and larval stage, before their metamorphosis into reef builders. I began filming at the Horniman Museum in late 2017, viewing this coral restoration project as a case study of new paradigms for multispecies living, environmental conservation, and natural history that are emerging in the wake of the “New Climatic Regime.” 2 Corals are “canaries in the coal mine,” their bleaching and demise markers of the devastating effects of climate 22

1 The author would like to thank Jamie Craggs, the Project Coral team, and the Horniman Museum and Gardens for their support. For the Love of Corals was produced with the support of Obsidian Coast and Fluxus Art Projects. 2 See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Originally published in French as Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris, 2015). 3 Retrieved from the website of the Horniman Museum and Gardens, https://www.horniman. ac.uk/about/museum-history. 4 Lynn Margulis coined the term “holobiont,” see Lynn Margulis and René Fester, eds., Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

change. Project Coral is an acknowledgment of the precarity of coral reef assemblages in a warming ocean, an affirmation of life-forms’ entanglements in this new climatic epoch from which humans can no longer extract themselves. But the project is equally a rediscovery of the sensitivities of our planet and its more-than-human inhabitants. Corals are intricate multispecies and multiscale ecological units. They demonstrate how life-forms are not separated from their environment but, on the contrary, by their sheer existence make and constitute environments for themselves and others, contributing to adjacent ecosystems with complex and far-reaching effects. Project Coral expands that assemblage to include scientists, aquarists, and a range of other human and nonhuman actants. FOR THE LOVE OF COR ALS is a cinematic inquiry and artist film developed over the course of a year, filming the daily labor of the team caring for these endangered beings, the relentless attempt to resuscitate corals from anthropogenic

extinction. The film follows the life cycle of the marine invertebrates in their laboratory tanks, replicating the seasonality and moon phase of an Australian reef in the basement of the Horniman Museum. This short essay will discuss some of the research that has informed this film project. I. Corals as Subversive Figures in the Natural Order

THE HORNIMAN MUSEUM and Gardens is an anthropology and natural history museum in South London, which also has an aquarium in its basement. Tea trader Frederick John Horniman, founder of the Museum, turned his extensive private collection into a public display in 1901, in a gesture to “bring the world to Forest Hill.”3 Public museums were part of the Western modernist project, and their collections gathered by the expansion of empires. Specimens collected from far and wide were placed “inside” the ordered and categorized space of the museum, promoting a modern scientific view of the

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5 See Bruno Latour and Timothy M. Lenton, “Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to Understand,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 659–80. 6 See Donna Haraway, “Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival” (lecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 23, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z-iEnSztKu8. 7 In The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Tsing urges us to look at what emerges in the ruins of capitalism. She invites us to examine closely the particular types of assemblages of disturbed human and nonhuman life, which arise from the politics of extractivism. See Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), see esp. 20.

world. Natural history museums are displays of the classifying and ordering impulse in search of the universal laws of “nature” that animated the early days of modern science. Embedded within the Horniman’s Victorian-era natural history collection, “nature” is presented as a domain of mute materialities governed by mechanistic principles. The systematic exhibits of the Natural History Gallery present species as extracted from their environment, obfuscating the vital codependency existing between life forms. By contrast, the work of Project Coral makes palpable the tangled web of humans, nonhuman life forms, and technologies that the corals depend on for their survival. As a model for the concept of “holobiont,” 4 corals are tangible world-makers — from their symbiotic relation with an alga dwelling inside their flesh, to their skeleton, built from bodily secretions, which creates shelters from which whole ecosystems emerge, affecting the productivity of the part of the ocean in which they settle. Coral reefs are “oases” in otherwise

8 See Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Cosmopolitics II, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Originally published as Cosmopolitiques I and Cosmopolitiques II (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).

barren seascapes, and we all depend directly or indirectly on the health of these holobionts. Their disappearance prefigures hunger and the collapse of the fisheries of many ocean-bordering communities. Moreover, we are just beginning to fathom how this drastic reduction in life might affect ocean chemistry and biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system. Corals demonstrate how life-forms terraform; they alter their environment, making it a place capable of supporting life. They disrupt the canonized animal, vegetal, and mineral categories of natural history. They subvert the notion of individuality to convey this complex notion that life-forms are always already entangled, enfolded into each other at a local scale whilst affecting global processes. The environment is not imposed upon life-forms but, on the contrary, life-forms make the various components of and for their own environment.5 I am interested to see how this figure of the coral and the urgent restoration projects being done to try and counteract their extinction

FIGS: A|I— Sonia Levy, For the Love of Corals,

2018. Film stills. With kind permission of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

might play out in redefining our ways of relating to and understanding “nature” — a necessary shift from perceiving it as a separated domain, to an understanding of the necessity of the enmeshment of life-forms, from which humans can’t extract themselves anymore. II. Scientific Caring6 in the Ruins,7 or the Scientists Who Share Their House with Sea Dwellers

IN A STR ANGE TURN of events, the colonial urge to gather knowledge during the Enlightenment period, the thirst for and collection of millions of specimens, which filled and built the natural history museums, zoological gardens, and aquariums, has resulted in repositories representative of past and ongoing capitalism-induced extinctions. Natural history museums and collections stand as testimonies of the invention of the colonial Western notions of human exceptionalism, the ways in which certain bodies and territories were turned into resources, but have 23

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9 See Albena Yaneva, “Introduction: What Is Cosmopolitical Design?,” in What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment, ed. Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo (London: Routledge, 2015), 1–20. 10 Isabelle Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box?,” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 3–34.

paradoxically become a tribute to the abundance and variation of life-forms that once populated the planet before this new climatic era. I wanted to examine how this architectural context of a museum — which still echoes Enlightenment values of Man mastery over nature — might become a base for a project with the potential to exemplify a collaborative multispecies survival endeavor. Whilst the corals remain in captivity as part of the Horniman’s “Living” Collection, the shared attempt to save them establishes a new and generative assemblage of life-affirming care. Acknowledgment of the damage caused to coral reefs is embodied in the work of the team at Project Coral — from the precision involved in Coral-IVF (in vitro fertilization) and the protocols of raising corals from their embryonic stage to the level of constant supervision that the project’s success requires. There is a crossover between the professional detached space of the scientific lab and the intimacy and responsibility of caring for a living being. The role of the team 24

is shaped by the custodianship of museum conservation and the epistemologies of the scientific method, but the scientists and the corals have also become involved in each other’s life. This proximity to and involvement with the corals is the sharing of a territorial space, both the familiar working space but in a cosmopolitical8 sense, too, in that it recognizes earthly commons. The scientists and the corals are entangled in sharing a space for working, living, and world-making, expanding the range of possible worlds in common.9 In the museum, an ordering impulse has been replaced with a world-making one, and a network of humans, nonhumans, life-forms, and technologies coalesce to form this critical practice of care. III. Documenting and Practicing Entanglements in the New Climatic Regime

THE TIDAL PULL of the moon is strong, considering how it permeates life-forms. Yearly mass

spawning of corals is prompted by the light of full moons, simultaneously uniting hundreds of different species at night across the ocean. Moonlight, especially that of the full moon, is symbolic of transformative power. Stories and myths involving moon phases are told as ways to see through darkness, in the absence of the illumination of knowledge — or perhaps as a different kind of knowledge. Indeed, as the objective, stable background for knowledge that “nature” once represented is now gone, philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers points out that the question “what do we know?” has been transformed into the question “what can we know?”10 It’s November 2017, the day of the full moon and I am invited to join Project Coral for the yearly spawning. Outside, it’s a shivery November day in London, inside I am projected into the tropical climate of the lab, its wetness and briny smell. A pervasive white noise is permeating the atmosphere as apparatuses are plugged in everywhere and water is pumped, the instruments sustaining this coral intensive care unit.

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A— Display cases at the Horniman Natural History Gallery. B— Lab grown corals from

the genus Acropora, born and bred at the Horniman. C— Details of a lab coral from the species Acropora millepora. D— Project Coral basement laboratory, behind-thescenes at the Horniman. E— Project Coral team inspecting corals under redlight around spawning-time. F— Project Coral team collecting eggs. G— Corals’ embryogenesis stages. H— Coral larvae in their

For spawning to occur during the daytime in the Inspecting the corals up close, Jamie expresses United Kingdom, cycles of the laboratory tanks that they are near to spawning. He is looking for at Project Coral are kept in such a way that their the pink bulge of the eggs as they appear in the night is our day. Jamie tells me the corals are corals’ mouths, a visual cue indicating the coloparticularly sensitive to disturbance with sun- ny impending spawn. light around spawning time since it could upLater that day, the corals start releasing their set the eggs’ release. Corals having evolved to eggs and I can just about film the team prudentspawn under the cover of night to avoid day- ly picking the pinhead-sized bundles, illuminatlight predators. Therefore, the team is equipped ed by the ominous red of their headlamps. with red-light headlamps, as they go in and out What is the role of filmmaking in this “new of a tarpaulin tent set up in front of the tanks. I climatic era”? And what are the representationfeel a sense of trepidation at first when I’m giv- al challenges involved in such a paradigm shift? en a red headlamp and step inside. I follow Jamie The fable of “nature” as a separate domain has as he is rapidly shining his headlamp over float- collapsed. Nature can no longer be represented ing containers. That is where the eggs will be “out there,” as a spectacle to be looked at from collected and attributed to the right individual. afar. As artists, shouldn’t our task become one of

free-swimming stage 24 hours after IVF procedure at the Horniman. I— One-year old coral born at the Horniman. J— Sonia Levy and Alexandra Arènes, The

Life Cycle of the Corals at the Horniman, 2018–19. Diagram. From induced spawning in lab-tanks replicating lunar cycle to IVF procedure and embryo development, to their transformation into free-swimming larva and metamorphosis into reef-builders.

bearing witness to this critical chain of interdependence brought about by this globalized state of precarity?

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The Anthropocene Square Meter Jan Zalasiewicz

IT IS HARD to get — or convey — a sense of proportion in time and space, especially when we try to consider our own planet, as the map of the world changes. A new world, which has been called that of the Anthropocene, is taking shape with a speed that is quite disconcerting. How big are these changes, in reality? We hold different personal perspectives on time, space, and process. We live around our constructions of concrete and brick, steel and glass, the spaces in between being filled with tarmac and organized greenery — gardens, lawns, fields. This has become our natural environment. But we also know that the world is large — not so long ago it was thought boundless — with unpeopled wilderness as backcloth to our homes and our cities. Among these contradictory perceptions, how, really, do our impacts and our constructions measure up against the bulk of the Earth? The Square Meter

LET US TRY to locate our own brief part of Earth history, and position it within time and space. To demonstrate human-driven change thus, we might of course use graphs, statistics, diagrams, or even, if we dare, equations. Perhaps it is best, though, to start with the simplest space. One square meter will do: a square meter of the Earth, to represent in microcosm the human-driven changes to the surface of our planet (see fig. 1). The Earth as a whole has an area, land surface and sea floor combined, of some 510 million kilometers. In meters that is therefore 510 trillion — or 510,000,000,000,000 — square meters. We speak of area because we are mostly concerned with the surface we live on, extending up or down a little as need be. Thus, we are more or less operating in the Critical Zone, which is biologically and chemically active (and physically active, too, as soil and rock is moved from one place to another). The deep Earth we will leave aside, for now. In millions of years to come, human traces may arrive there too — carried, say, by subducting tectonic plates. That will be another story, unfolding at what is generally understood as geological speed; in the future, we may have time to consider it at leisure. Events in the Critical Zone, today, allow us no such luxury. A square meter is convenient. We can manufacture it as the ultimate microcosm of our planet, as it is today in its current transition. It can occupy the center of a small room in a

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museum or art center — or even perhaps find a spot in some town square, for passers-by to puzzle over. It can be transported from place to place in a small van, and it can even be moved physically by human muscle power (though it may need a couple of moderately strong humans in this case). The muscle power is necessary, as the explicit two dimensions of such a square meter invariably (in geology, at least) arrive with the two other dimensions in tow. The third dimension is of depth and of internal structure quite substantial and complex (and in reality more like a cube, as we shall see). This square meter is a solid material presence that would be painful to drop on one’s toe, monstrously at odds with the infinitesimal sliver of the fourth dimension of geological time that it represents. Selecting just one of those square meters as planetary representative, we can take the ingredients of our constructions, and arrange them on it in approximate proportion to their number on the whole Earth. That, then, might give a human-scale idea of how much the Earth has changed. This process is not without its perils, of course. Some things average better than others, and the Earth, anthropogenized or not, is endlessly heterogeneous. Atmospheric carbon dioxide only needs a year or so to mix well into the global atmosphere (though it takes about a millennium in the oceans). Concrete, by contrast, will pile up much more in some places than others, though consideration of the pathways of pebbles and sand grains of eroded concrete can be rewarding, and among the proper concerns of a geologist. Plastic, it is turning out, can be alarmingly mobile, and its mercurial traveling habits remain sufficiently uncharted that we are not yet able to work out quite what shape “global plastic” will turn out to have. So, providing one is quite aware of the treacherousness of the ground ahead, we can begin … Making a Start

ONE MIGHT START extravagantly, with the total amount of everything we have made or used — whether it is still in use or thrown away. This amount is an exceedingly rough estimate, but nevertheless a revealing one. It is made simply by taking estimates of the world’s geography — and of the proportions taken up by cities, farmland, roads, reservoirs, deep-trawled seafloors, and the like. Then, one makes estimates of the average thickness

Fig. 1: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene Square Meter, 2019. Drawing.

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Fig. 2: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene Square Meter, 2019. Sketch.

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of the human-modified layers of these categories, thus allowing estimates of volume and not just of area. Adding in estimates of specific gravity allows conversion of that volume into mass. The estimate sketched by this primitive means, on the scientific equivalent of the back of a beermat, amounts to around 30 trillion tons,1 of which the proportion for our square meter is around 50 kilos. So already our exhibit is substantial, and will need those two strong people to carry. One might take this as a kind of basic mass, in which some parts might simply be weighed and measured as components in our discussion, while others might inter-transmute, while yet others might seem to appear or disappear, as their matter rises from deep in the Earth, or is blown in with the winds. Within that — what are our bulk components? A little more than half is the material we have assembled into our towns and cities, and most of that is the rubble and reworked rock and soil upon which their foundations are built: one might allow perhaps a kilogram or two for the buildings themselves, which rise like mushrooms above its surface. A little under a third of the total comprises the soils of our croplands and pastures, now subsumed as part of our life support system. A little under a tenth of the total — say three kilos — is the submarine soils that we plow through by trawling the sea floor: wet sea floor mud, churned over, and depleted in clay (that, disturbed by the trawling, has drifted off to the deep ocean floor). Small chips of rock and dirt, tiny wood fragments, and puddles of water can represent our mine and quarry waste, roads and railways, plantations and reservoirs (both water and sediment). A roughly assembled irregular stratal patchwork to represent this on our square meter might reach a couple of tens of centimeters thick — and so, on average, we live a little more than ankle-deep in this (mostly) Anthropocene muck and rubble. This is uncannily close to the average thickness of “natural” soils and the active surface layers of seafloor sediments (which it is, of course, in part reworking and replacing). As we trudge through this new kind of morass, what recognizable human-made materials might we chance upon? Specifics

THE TECHNIQUE HER E is simple. There are organizations that track (or attempt to) the amount of different materials that we collectively, globally, produce. The United States Geological Survey (USGS), for instance, has a fine store of statistics on minerals mined out of the Earth this past century. Collecting this data is an enormous task, but without it we would be blind to some important dimensions of planetary change. The statistics can be summed, and then converted into an amount for just one square meter of the Earth. Take that practical symbol of modernity, concrete. It is

in some ways an ancient invention, with early versions being made by the Romans. But really it is a thing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the brute figures show. In the years immediately after World War II, global production was about a third of a billion tons a year. By about 1970, that had climbed to 5 billion tons a year, and by the beginning of this millennium, it was reaching 10 billion tons. Concrete production is now nearing 30 billion tons a year. Sum the annual figures and they total some 500 billion tons. That means for each square meter of the Earth’s surface, there is a kilogram of concrete, some in use, in buildings or roads, and some already discarded, broken up, and scattered as rubble in urban soils. So, our chosen square meter gets a kilo-sized lump too (or, alternatively, we might delicately spread a two-millimeter-thick concrete layer across our square meter). About half of this lump has appeared since the beginning of this millennium. And it is growing, at some 50 grams per year; so our exhibit must keep pace too, if it is not just to be a museum piece. Bricks? This amount is harder to estimate, as bricks have had a longer use in the history of construction. But currently, between a trillion and a trillion-and-a-half bricks are produced each year. If bricks have anything like the growth curve shown by concrete, that would yield a figure of something like 25 trillion bricks produced on Earth. So, a brick fragment of about 100 grams joins the other materials on our square meter. One might continue with plastic, a symbol of modernity (see fig. 2). Plastics are genuinely new in human history, a phenomenon dating back, in any globally significant sense, to the middle of the twentieth century. Data on plastics is a little beyond the remit of the USGS, but thanks to the statistical efforts of the Association of Plastics Manufacturers, one could follow its rise on the Earth (however, recently, as negative publicity has grown, this association has been a little more coy). The stuff now seems ubiquitous, but is it really so, globally? The figures amassed show that production of plastics rose from something like 2 million tons per year at the beginning of the 1950s, climbing to 50 million tons annually by the mid1970s, and then more steeply to over 300 million tons per year now. Produce a total of those figures, and the cumulative figure is around 8 billion tons. That’s a large figure, but what does it mean? Convert that plastic, now, into standard kitchen plastic wrap. It would wrap around the whole Earth, both land and sea, more than one and a half times. We may therefore easily cover our entire, representative square meter in plastic wrap. How might we shape this loosely fitting layer so as to be most realistic? A little of the Earth’s plastic has been recycled, some has been burnt, but most is still out there, buried in landfill sites or simply littering the Earth, both on land and at sea, including as the now near-ubiquitous microplastic fibers washed out of our synthetic clothes. So, for veracity, we may scorch some holes in

1 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective,” The Anthropocene Review 4, no. 1 (2017): 9–22.

THE ANTHROPOCENE SQUARE METER

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Fig. 3-5: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene Square Meter, 2019. Detail.

our meter of plastic wrap, and cut a few parts out, and throw in square centimeters, big enough to come out of a cigarette packa few hundred microscopic fibers. Plastic is particularly noticea- et (see fig. 3). Paper? — enough has been made for at least one ble on beaches around the Earth, where it has been found every- sheet of paper, as large as the one you are reading. Cigarettes? where from the tropics to the polar regions. On Hawaii, there — a little over half of a cigarette butt, given that over 250 trilis so much plastic that tourist campfires have caused it to melt lion cigarettes have been smoked since the mid-twentieth cenand to flow around the beach pebbles, creating a new rock type tury. It has been estimated that about two-thirds of those cigathat has been given the name plastiglomerate. Not only on Ha- rette butts have simply been thrown away and then wind up in waii: the melting of discarded plastic, industrially, domestical- the environment, which probably explains why they regularly, and haphazardly, has taken place on such a scale that peb- ly top the list of the most abundant objects recovered during bles of pyroplastic (yet another neologism of the Anthropocene) clean-ups of our seashores (see fig. 4). now commonly wash up on the world’s beaches. The melting And so we can go on, with glass, fabrics, and so on. Our has turned them grey and opaque, so they look just like a rock square meter is, on closer examination, crowded with the depebble — but throw them into a bucket of water, and they will tritus of humanity. And these are new materials, recognizably float. So, a little of the plastic on our square meter should take unlike natural ones. Iron and aluminum are more or less pure the form of tiny pyroplastic droplets, scattered here and there. forms of metals that in nature are almost everywhere linked Iron? Add up the USGS figures and something in excess with different elements to form mineral compounds: they of 10 billion tons of iron and steel have been produced. That are, in effect, new minerals. There is nothing quite like conis some 20 grams for our square meter, which one can express crete among the Earth’s array of natural rocks. And the kind of as a scattering of a dozen or so nails and screws. Aluminum? metamorphism applied to the clay of bricks — geologically inThere’s not quite as much of this — about half a billion tons stantaneous heating to the point of melting — is rarely present produced all told, virtually all since the mid-twentieth centu- in the Earth’s armory of natural processes. ry. That little can still go quite a long way: as a scrap of kitchThis is a physical dimension, of distinctive human-made en aluminum foil, for our square meter, of about a hundred or human-moved materials with recognizable patterns,

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compositions, and textures. Geologists would class them within lithostratigraphy, the discipline of recognizing, classifying, and mapping rock strata across the Earth. Our square meter here represents an average, of course. Parts of the world are still free of such human debris. Others, though, are piled high with it, as a glance at any town or city center will show. That glance, though, takes in only the surface structures growing out of the ground; it will not show the buried substructure, which exceeds it in bulk. The Invisible

THE THIRD DIMENSION of our square meter extends up above the solid surface, too. In the realm of the invisible, there is quite literally a change in the air, and that can be registered, also. On our square meter, there are the ghosts of former rocks, sacrificed to power our collective metabolism. There will be the outline of a lump of coal that once weighed a few hundred grams, our chosen meter’s share of the 200 billion tons or so of this rock extracted from the ground since coal-mining began, a spectral cup of petroleum oil, and a large balloon-full of natural gas. These have now been transformed into carbon dioxide, nearly half of which still hangs in the atmosphere above.

THE ANTHROPOCENE SQUARE METER

If we were to collect all of the carbon dioxide generated from this geologically instantaneous outburst of hydrocarbon-fueled energy, it would, for our square meter’s share, make up most of the couple of kilograms of human-produced carbon dioxide above our chosen space (for, oxygen atoms are added to the carbon, hence the increased mass). Therefore, this gas would bulk out to rival the mass of our lump of concrete. The equation here becomes a little complex. Part of the mass might be thought to be in addition to that already calculated for our square meter, with some carbon pulled from deep in the Earth added to oxygen taken from the atmosphere. Part, though, is already accounted for, in the reshaping of landscapes as open-cast coal mines — continuously dug and infilled — migrate across them. If present as a pure gas at ground level at atmospheric pressure, the carbon dioxide would simply rest gently atop our square meter, covering it to a meter’s depth (thus, our device has become a cubic meter, mostly gas by volume) — and growing at about a millimeter a fortnight. In reality, part of that carbon dioxide has gone, been absorbed into plants or dissolved into the oceans to make them a little more acidic. Yet more, though, has been added to the air by burning forests and peatlands, by cement manufacture, and by other ways in which we have changed the world’s chemistry. What is left up there in the air is now close to the trillion tons or so of carbon dioxide that is the human-made share of the mass of that gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. In reality, that extra carbon dioxide gas is mixed into the column of atmosphere that is approximately 15 kilometers or so high (that, at least, is the thickness of the lowest level, the troposphere, which contains most of the atmosphere’s bulk). But considering it as a layer of pure gas shows more clearly how much is out there. Because carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas (unlike nitrogen or oxygen), it is making the Earth warmer, and is a key factor in our representative square meter currently — along with the rest of the Earth’s surface — having an “energy imbalance” of about a watt. That means that there is on our square meter, every second, enough extra energy to keep one of those small Christmas-tree light bulbs continuously lit (and so we can hang one of these cheerful ornaments just above the square meter, to warm its surface). Hour by hour and year by year, this extra heat builds up at the Earth’s surface. It is a little difficult to represent on our totemic square meter. Most is being stored in the oceans (warming them and making their volume expand) and in the surface rock and soil layers of the landmasses. The air temperature — what we humans are mostly concerned about — will take some time (decades, centuries, and, when other feedbacks such as methane from melting permafrost come into play, millennia) to equilibrate with the extra heat stored in the oceans and solid Earth surface. Something else we are concerned about,

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sea level, will also take decades to millennia to adjust to the Life on a Square Meter Earth’s new energy balance, as large ice masses melt and intermittently collapse. These parts of the Anthropocene phenom- THER E AR E LIVING things too, the patterns of which have enon still lie largely in the future. Enough has melted thus far, been transformed by us. In a square meter of soil these will be though, to cover our square meter to a depth of more than 10 worms, ants, spiders, millipedes, springtails, beetles, and other centimeters, and so we can submerge our solid Anthropocene tiny forms of life that we mostly ignore. Yet smaller are the meisurface below this newly formed meltwater, as in an aquari- ofauna, tiny things such as nematode worms, gastrotrichs, kinoum (a freshwater aquarium, naturally, as this is ice — salt-free rhyncha, and other creatures that most people have never heard whether it is sea ice or land ice — which is, melting). The wa- of: fully formed animals, they can be smaller than protozoans. ter level will need adjusting year by year, for now by raising it a And there will of course be the protozoans, too, and bacteria, allittle less than 3 millimeters higher each year (a number reached gae, fungi, archaea, and viruses. It is an intricate microscopic by spreading the current global sea level rise of some 4 millim- ecosystem that has surely been massively changed by human aceters a year — taking place in the oceans that cover some two- tion (not least, by all of those new chemicals) and by draining, plowing, and building on the ground — and by bringing soil thirds of Earth — across the whole planetary surface). If we are imaginative enough, we might be able to repre- and plants from other continents for our gardens, among which sent on our square meter other changes: say, the doubling of re- are a whole army of tiny invasive species which are changing this active surface nitrogen brought about by the Haber-Bosch pro- (to us) invisible realm. The problem of how we demonstrate this transformation is cess, making the fertilizer that keeps most of us alive, or the changes in global biodiversity as forests and prairies are con- made acute by our lack of understanding of how they are changverted into farmland. There is, too, the extraordinary array of ing. Take the most visible of these life forms — the insects that manufactured objects that humans have produced, which a ge- fly above our square meter. It was discovered only a few years ologist might regard as future technofossils — that is, trace fos- ago that their total number, as biomass over an average piece of sils akin to the footprint of a dinosaur or the burrow of a worm, European landscape, has dropped by some 75% over a quarter of but of unprecedented variety and sophistication. Some of these a century,2 for reasons that so far can only be suspected rather words have been written on one kind of technofossil (a laptop than pinned down. The vanished insects are among the ghosts, computer) while traveling in another (a train). In the Anthro- likely slain by the clear-felling of the trees that gave them cover, by the new molecules designed to kill them, by the light we pocene, almost everything becomes geology. Then, there are the very tiny things. Fossil smoke from our now flood across the Earth (and so the square meter must be a factories and industrial chimneys is one (see fig. 5). This is made fraction brighter than in primeval times, when a firefly’s glow of minuscule particles — little spheres ten- to twenty-thou- had unhindered functional meaning). The firefly’s glow, of course, lit up the primeval forest darksandths of a millimeter across — of unburnt carbon (which are indigestible by worms or microbes and therefore very decay-re- ness, and this memory causes a rather larger ghost to drift drifts sistant) or microscopic melted silica spheres, from any sand or across our square meter. This square meter might include its clay that was in coal (most of these will dissolve underground, representative part of all life, its own Gaia-fragment. Today, the but they will lie on the surface for now). Our average square me- Earth’s life weighs in at an estimated 550 billion tons of carter will have many thousands of these, most accumulated since bon-equivalent: add in the other chemical constituents of life, water included, and that becomes some 2.5 trillion tons; our the mid-twentieth century (smoky areas may have millions). There are the even tinier things — molecules of DDT, diel- square meter’s share of it is about 5 kilos. One might perhaps drin, aldrin, toxaphene, endosulfan, lindane, and many other represent it as a kind of living skin, a few millimeters thick. new chemicals which have soaked into the ground as pesticides But, in reality, most life on Earth by mass — approaching 90% or from pollution by wind or water. These are measured usually — is made up of the trees of our forests (the plankton of the in billionths of a gram per square meter, and one might think of oceans may be more extensive, but they are also much more working out how many molecules of some of these there might diaphanous). So, we should plant a 4-kilogram shrub somebe (it will be very many, even in clean areas). And going yet tini- where among the rubble and the concrete — it’s sizeable, but er, there are the atoms of plutonium, caesium, americium, and nevertheless it is a diminished shrub. The authors of that globothers, making a square meter slightly but detectably radioac- al biomass study noted, as an aside, that global biomass had aptive. Other additions are less exotic, but are key actors on this proximately halved since humans began to reshape landscapes, stage — the doubled amounts of phosphorus and reactive ni- largely by the clearing of forests.3 So, our shrub looks sicktrogen, which make any grass above grow unnaturally greener. ly. It has some branches lopped off, others burnt, and its roots 2 Caspar A. Hallmann et al., “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,” PLOS One 12, no. 10 (2017): e0185809. 3 Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The biomass distribution on Earth,” PNAS 115, no. 25 (2018): 6506–11.

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are beginning to wither; it is diminishing still, as Amazon and — will double (and more) in bulk within the next few decades, other forests burn. The ghost tree of the prehuman past once and it is hard to see where or how this trajectory will end. spread its branches wide enough over the square meter of the More: the scale of this change is not yet predictable. The carpast for fireflies to find each other, but the feeble descendent of bon release, which in theory is under human control, is one matoday no longer encourages such easy communication. jor factor. It will be a key determinant of global temperature, Where has the vanished bulk of this now-more-emaciated sea level, ocean oxygenation state and acidity, and hence of the Gaia-figure gone to? Much is in the air, adding to the carbon di- biosphere. The carbon dioxide factor has a long track record of oxide, or washed into the oceans. Some is cycling through live- causing planetary change, and the current trajectory is at the stock. Part of it, as planks, fences, flooring, and tables, is among extreme end of things. Then there are all those human-made the technofossils — perhaps represented by some scattered novelties, such as the evolution of the elaborately engineered, matchsticks and broken pencils amid the rubble of the square energy-hungry technological objects that, for now, keep us varmeter. It is one of the more complex equations of this exercise, iously fed, amused, distracted, and manipulated. Collectively, but arguably the most important one. they and we humans have been termed the technosphere. An offshoot of the biosphere, the technosphere is showing signs of Postscript taking on a life of its own or, in the language of science, of acting as an emergent system with its own dynamics. Quite where THER E IS YET more that we could do to our square meter: this will go is unclear, and here we really have no precedent at lightly marinate it in the polluted gray water given off by industry all. What will happen, say, when we manufacture an electronic (a millimeter or two a year), for instance. But the square meter is, intelligence more powerful than our own? Somewhere on our in the end, just a device, to show that this human-driven Earth square meter, already, there is a fragment of a microchip. This is is being pushed very hard and variously — perhaps harder and an easy and banal symbol, though it is far harder to symbolize faster than ever before (it really is reasonable to make compari- a microcosm of the web of global connections that is mutating sons with end-Cretaceous asteroids or giant end-Permian volca- and growing as these machines evolve, year after year. noes). This human pressure — or at least the great bulk of it (so Events are moving fast, and the science is moving fast too far) — has been applied for only a few decades. As it is increas- — at a pace that is rather uncomfortable to the field of geology, ing from decade to decade, and indeed, from year to year, we used to taking decades to ponder complex questions of demarhave yet to see its full effects. Unless something very remarkable cation lines within Earth’s history. Keeping our square meter happens within human society, the bubble of carbon dioxide on in mind, though, and developing its logic may help us keep in our square meter — and many of the other, more solid objects mind what is going on on this planet of ours.

THE ANTHROPOCENE SQUARE METER

33

The Infinity of the Anthropocene: A (Hi)story With A Thousand Names 1

Clémence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon AEROCENE AGNOTOCENE ALIENOCENE ANGLOCENE ANTHROBSCENE ANTHROCENE

(Saraceno 2015 (a); Saraceno 2015 (b)) (Mentz 2018) (Chardronnet 2016; Neyrat 2019) (Fressoz 2015)

BIOSPHERE BUYOSPHERE CAPITALOCENE

(Vernadsky 2005; Williams et al., 2016) (Goleman 2010) (Altaver et al. 2016; Haraway 2017;

Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2017 (a);Moore 2017 (b))

ermer 2000; Crutzen 2002; Crutzen, McNeill and Steffen 2007;

CERAMISCENE (Ulla and Philip 2014) CHTHULUCENE (Haraway 2015) COGNISPHERE (Hayles 2006) COSMOSCENE (Lorimer 2015) COSPHERE (Chan et al. 2017) CRYOSPHERE (Gabrieli and Barbante 2014; Sörlin 2015) CYANOCENE (Sagan in Tsing 2017) EARLY-ANTHROPOCENE (Crutzen 2003; Hamilton

Crutzen 2010; Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill 2011;

2015; Heringman 2015; Ruddiman 2003; Ruddiman 2011; Steff-

Zalasiewicz 2008)

en, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill 2011; Wright 2017; Zalasie-

(Parikka 2014) (Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2014;

Revkin 1992)

ANTHROPO-NOT-SEEN (De la Cadena 2015) ANTHROPO-SCENES (Castree 2015; Howe and Pandian 2016; Lorimer 2017; Matless 2017)

ANTHROPOCENE

(AWG 2009; Crutzen and Sto-

ANTHROPOMEME ANTHROPOSPHERE

(Braidotti 2018; Macfarlane 2016) (Costanza,Steffen,and

Graumlich 2007; Ehlers and Kraft 2006; Murtugudde 2010; Rockström 2015; Steffen et al. 2015; Steffen 2006)

AQUATOCENE ARCHEOSPHERE

(Šebjanič and Šutić 2018) (Edgeworth 2015;

Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2014)

ATMOSPHERE BETACENE 34

1 The following dates correspond to the sources’ editions and not the invention of the names.

ECOSPHERE ENTROPOCENE EUROCENE EXTRACTIVOCENE GAIA (or NOVACENE?)

(Murtugudde 2010) (Grinevald 1984) (Grove 2019) (Hubert 2017) (Debaise and Stengers 2015;

(Crutzen 2006)

Danowski 2014; Latour 2014; Latour 2015; Lenton and Watson 2011; Lenton, O’Riordan 2014; Lovelock 2019; Stengers 2013) and

(Clark and Yusoff 2017;

Dalby 2007; Dalby 2015; Sloterdijk 2015; Yusoff 2013)

GEOSPHERE GOOD ANTHROPOCENE

(Bohle 2017) (Breakthrough Institute 2017;

Ellis 2011; Demos 2018; Hamilton 2015; Hamilton and Grinevald 2015; Latour 2015; Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2004)

GYNECENE HETEROCENE HOLOCENE

(Demos 2019; Pirici and Voinea 2015) (Schwägerl 2014) (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000;

Marris in Hamilton, Gemenne, and Bonneuil 2015; Zalasiewicz 2010; Waters, Zalaziewicz et al., 2016; Zalasiewicz 2017)

HOMOGENOCENE HUMANOSPHERE

(Mann 2011) (Ishikawa

in Haraway et al. 2016)

HYDROSPHERE

wicz 2015)

Dutreuil 2016; Clarke 2017; Latour, Viveiros de Castro, and

(Demos 2017; Howe and Pandian 2016)

GEOPOLISCENE

(Hatje, Costa, and Cotrim da Cunha

2013; Syvitski and Kettner Albert 2011)

KNOWOSPHERE LITHOSPHERE MANTHROPOCENE

(Revkin 2012) (Richter et al. 2015) (Chiro 2017; Glabau 2017;

Grusin 2017; Raworth 2014)

MAYACENE METEOROCENE

(Beach 2015) (Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2014;

Yusoff, Povinelli, and Coleman 2017)

MISANTHROPOCENE MOLYSMOCENE MULTITUDOCENE MYXOCENE

SCHNUBELEDULDIDLOCENE (Dusseiller Dusjagr in Berg-

(Teurlai in Bourriaud 2018)

er 2018) ŠMANTHROPOCENE (Dusseiller Dusjagr in Berg-

(Szaniecki 2018)

er 2018) SOLU-O-CENE (Bovermann, O’Reilly, and Grayson

(Pauly 2010; Triplett,

in Berger 2018) STUPIDOCENE (Clément and Nicolino 2017)

ROBOTOCENE SUSTAINOCENE

TERATOCENE (Chardonnet 2016) THRILLOSPHERE (Un-

Murtugudde 2010)

known) UNDOCENE (Tenetz in Berger 2018) WASTEOCENE

SYMBIOCENE TECHNOPOCENE

Kettenring, Tal, and Smith 2014)

NAUFRAGOCENE NECROCENE NEGANTHROPOCENE NEOLOGISMCENE

RACIAL CAPITALOCENE

(Clover and Spahr 2014)

(Mentz 2015; Grinevald 1984) (Mc Brien in Altaver et al. 2016)

(Armiero 2018)

(Stiegler 2018)

NOOSPHERE

(Mentz 2017):

ANDROCENE (Bardini in Berger 2018) ANTHRO-WHATNOT-CENE (Rachev in Berger 2018) ANTI-ANTHROPOCENE (Demos 2017) ASICENE (Treister 2018) DUBAI SCENE (Moore 2018) ENDCENE (Flemming in Berger 2018) ENTREPOCENE (Unknown) ERGOCENE (Rosol, Nelson, and Renn 2017) ERGOSPHERE (Rosol, Nelson and Renn 2017) ETHNOSPHERE (Davis and Keogh in Möllers and al. 2015) GLOBAL SPHERE (Unknown) HOULOCENE (Studio Corps 2019) LICHENOCENE (Macfarlane 2016) NEOLIBERALOCENE (Hubert 2017) NORTHOPOCENE (Raworth 2014) NUMERICOCENE

Amaral-Zettler 2013)

(Unknown) OBSCENE (Moore 2018) OLIGANTHROCENE

POLEMOCENE PUBLIC SPHERE

(Mentz 2017) OOPS-A-DAY-CENE (Prittinen in Berger 2018) PALEO-ANTHROPOCENE (Zalasiewicz 2017) POST-ANTHROPOCENE (Unknown) PROKARYOCENE (Park in Berger 2018)

(Robbins 2019) (Faunce 2012 (a); Faunce 2012 (b); (Albrecht 2016) (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013; Boyd 2016;

Crutzen 2007; Hamilton 2013; Hamilton 2013; Hornborg in

(Clarke 2017)

TECHNOSPHERE (Haff 2014) THALASSOCENE (Mentz 2015; Mentz 2017) THANATOCENE (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013) THEOSPHERE (Shafer 2002) THERMOCENE (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013) TROPOSPHERE (Crutzen 2002; Vernadky 2005) TRUMPOCENE (Mentz 2018) URBAN-ANTHROPOCENE (Allenby 2004;

Hamilton, Gemenne, and Bonneuil 2015; Neyrat 2014) (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013) (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013) (Myers 2019) (Haraway et al. 2016; Tsing 2015) (Myers 2019) (The Editorial Board in

The New York Times 2014; Yoldas 2014)

PLASTISPHERE

Wooley 2018)

(Hamilton and Grinevald 2015;

Vernadsky 2005)

OIL-O-CENE PHAGOCENE PHRONOCENE PHYTOCENE PLANTATIONOCENE PLANTHROPOSCENE PLASTICENE

(Johson and Lubin 2017;

(Zettler, Mincer, and

Swilling 2015)

WHITE SUPREMACY SCENE

(Mirzoeff 2016)

(Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013) (Autin and Holbrook 2012;

The Economist 2011)

PYROCENE

(Pyne 2018) 35

36

A— Clémence Hallé, Anne-Sophie Milon, Le Vertige de l’Anthropocène (The Infinity of the Anthropocene), 2019.

37

B

C

D

E

2 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (New York: Rizzoli, 2009). Originally published in Italian as Vertigine della lista (Milan: Bompiani, 2009). 3 See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugène F. Stoermer, “Have We Entered the Anthropocene?,” IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17f. 4 Based on the Scopus database. 5 Based on the Science Scape tool and Gephi software of the Sciences Po Paris’s médialab. 6 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21. 7 Raghu Murtugudde, “Earth System Science and the Second Copernican Revolution,” Current Science 98, no. 12 (2010): 1579–83.

THE LIST on the pages XX and XX, titled The Infinity of the Anthropocene after Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists,2 enumerates 109 proposals for alternative names for the Anthropocene, along with their authors and sources. They were collected by the illustrator Anne-Sophie Milon and myself, the researcher Clémence Hallé, during our respective projects on the diffusion of the geological hypothesis within Earth System Science and, later, the humanities and the arts. We completed our collection by analyzing the abstracts of 1820 articles mentioning the term “Anthropocene,” published from the year 2000, when it was popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen,3 to the present.4 As we see it, each of these 109 neologisms puts forth a vision of the world in the times (cene) of the human being (anthropos), with regard to its agents — whether human or not — its territory, its temporalities, and its relations to other visions. To visualize their respective locations in our corpus, we used médialab tools to extract a bipartite graph that presents the main 38

8 See Will Steffen et al. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 7263 (2009): 472–5. 9 See Murtugudde, “Earth System Science and the Second Copernican Revolution,” 1579–83. 10 See Noboru Ishikawa et al., “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2015): 1–30. 11 See William F. Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261–93. 12 See Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, “Introduction: Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen,” 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-lexicon-for-ananthropocene-yet-unseen.

authors of the articles analyzed and the keywords they use in the form of nodes linked to each other, then these nodes were distributed in space, in the center or in the margins, according to the frequency with which they are cited.5 As we navigated through these nodes and their links, we found communities of authors emerging around keywords that we could match to one or the other of the proposals in our list. We used the size and position of the nodes as geographical coordinates to locate these proposals. We then drew a speculative map representing each of their territories, outlined by the borders they share with their friends or opponents. There is obviously no pure and perfect correspondence between the spatialization of scientific literature and the speculative map. While the former made it possible to draw the large regions of the latter, that is, its “spheres,” as well as its temporal reference unit, that is, the Anthropocene, these schematic landmarks are transient, never fixed. To be sure, they are useful for locating proposals, but always temporarily, as

alternative names constantly change as they are created, quoted, discarded, erased, and taken up again. The map is a guide to navigate through the multitude of neologisms that have been imagined in all disciplines since the Anthropocene hypothesis was first articulated. We argue that it can be read as an animation of the negotiation between these different visions of the world that seek, each in their own way, to give a face to the hypothesis. Ultimately it tells its own story, drawn in Anne-Sophie’s aesthetics, revealing the environments, ends, and beginnings of infinite imaginaries; a story with a hundred names. We started off by placing the Anthroposphere at the center of our map, based on the coordinates of the node that mark one of the most frequently cited keywords, Global Change,6 associated with Earth System, Planetary Boundaries, and authors such as Will Steffen (see fig. A). In reference to climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s definition of the Earth System, quoted in one of our articles as “consisting of the ecosphere and the anthroposphere, where

F

Details from Clémence Hallé, Anne-Sophie Milon, Le Vertige de l’Anthropocène (The Infinity of the Anthropocene), 2019. B C D E F

the ecosphere includes all natural spheres such as the geosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere, and the biosphere,” 7 we drew the Anthroposphere in the form of the planetary boundaries described by his colleague Will Steffen,8 which we replaced with some of the natural spheres, mixed in with other human spheres from our list (see fig. B). We determined the Anthropocene’s position from the coordinates of the Stratigraphy nodes of Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, the geologists of the Anthropocene Working Group tasked with evaluating the initial Crutzen hypothesis as a geologic time unit. The Anthropocene introduces a relationship to time within our different spheres, and marks our reference temporal unity, while the Anthroposphere allowed us to draw the meridians outlining the main regions of our map. Yet these boundaries tend to blur when in contact with other worlds. We placed four propositions on the map, determined from our reading of the keywords and the authors of the graph, as guiding cardinal points. To the West lies the Ecosphere,9 where

Vernadsky’s Noösphere is extended by the Technosphere — a term promoted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin to describe the Anthropocene, based on the relationship between humans and technology, and which tends to naturalize the latter. The Technosphere’s relationship with the Atmosphere is ambiguous (see fig. C). To the East,Noboru Ishikawa’s Humanosphere10 hosts, amongst others, the Plastisphere, which extends the Hydrosphere. The Plasticene floats in the Aquatocene and adjoins the Thalassocene, which shares its borders with the Trumpocene and the Molysmocene, thus forming the Misanthropocene, while the Naufragocene fades out into the Necrocene (see fig. D). We located Ruddiman’s Early-Anthropocene hypothesis11 in the North (see fig. E), and in the South, anthropologists Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian’s Betacene hypothesis (see fig. F),12 designed to use the heuristic potential of these multiple resistance names to imagine other possible futures. We thus find, from North to South, the Mayacene, the Ceramiscene, and the

The Anthroposphere The Technosphere The Humanosphere The Early-Anthropocene The Betacene

Anthrobscene in the Archeosphere, which extends theLithosphere,allthewaytothePlantationocene, the Chthulucene, the Alienocene or the Cosmoscene in Gaia, which extends the Theosphere. And then, on the map’s very edge, the Neologismcene, whereeachnewnameexploresanewworld.

Translated from the French by Liz Carey Libbrecht. 39

Climate Snap: At the Sign of the White Flower Robert Boschman These are topics by which the geography of plants is related to geology. By shedding light on the prehistory of our planet, it offers to the human imagination a field to cultivate that is as rich as it is interesting. 1 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland (1805) The results of this study show human populations can continue to survive in a variety of conditions, and adapt accordingly to changes in their environment. 2 Christopher Andrews (2017)

I.

1

2

3

THE YOUNGER DRYAS (YD) is the name given to a period of rapid climate change in which temperatures fell by about ten degrees Celsius in the span of a century. This cooling period began 12,900 years before the present (BP) and produced a noticeable behavioral response by humans living in northern Europe at that time. It is called Dryas after the small white flower, Dryas octopetala, that proliferated during this cold snap which lasted over a thousand years.3 The YD cooling period is part of a longer warming trend in the transition from the last Ice Age to the Holocene. In the geological record of the Earth, it’s a 1,200-year blip of ice and white flowers in an elongated warming trend. Competing hypotheses on why this abrupt re-glaciation occurred in the first place can be discovered across the archeological studies of this period and are not part of this brief essay. Suffice it to say here that consensus appears around thermohaline circulation (THC) as the cause.4 De-glaciation at the end of the last Ice Age produced large volumes of fresh water flowing into the North Atlantic, which in turn overwhelmed the Gulf Stream’s circulating warm waters and accompanying milder temperatures throughout northwestern Europe. With this conveyer belt of warmth removed, the glaciers returned. As anthropogenic warming causes the Greenland ice sheets to melt today, THC in the North Atlantic is now a matter of concern. Part of the rose family, Dryas Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants [1805], ed. Stephen T. octopetala may be viewed as both Jackson, trans. Sylvie Romanowski (Chicago: Universetting and sign (see fig. 1): the sity of Chicago Press, 2009), 69. First published in French as Essai sur la géographie des plantes (Paris: setting is one of drastic change, Schoell, 1805). evidenced by its pollen in the Christopher Andrews, “Human Responses to Climate stratigraphic record; the sign is Change during the Younger Dryas in Northwest Europe” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2017), 246. geopolitical, cultural, and historical. Both can be seen as being for For temperature changes associated with the YD, Andrews provides a summary of the evidence in “Human us right now. Responses,” 10–5; 22: “There is clear evidence of an abrupt climatic deterioration at the onset of the YD which is universally seen in the northwest European record” (ibid., 14).

4 See National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education, ed. Richard J. Shavelson and Lisa Towne (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002).

40

As the thick forests of the preceding period, the Allerød, fell back, while the land froze (also becoming much wetter, with the permafrost locking in), this small plant migrated from its more northerly reaches and introduced itself.5 I imagine the humans of that time took note. Picture a scene: this small pale flower with its whorl of eight petals and yellow center, observed by a human for the first time. In due course, dappled seas of white and yellow followed, as the boreal receded and the land opened up in the Allerød’s wake. Archeologists report that this event happened relatively quickly: abrupt is the word they use. And humans responded in their patterns of mobility and tool manufacture, the latter left behind and preserved in the strata of northwestern Europe. At our own point in time, today, with similarly drastic changes occurring and about to occur, we can appreciate and learn from the resilient human response to the YD because of the extensive work of archeologists and anthropologists over the last 80 years. They have uncovered — sometimes in

at Ahrensburg is the partly reforested remnant of a river valley that survived the re-glaciation that occurred with the YD onset. Since the mid-twentieth century, sites like this have been uncovered across northwestern Europe — and what they mean, what they tell us now, is summarized in a 2017 doctoral thesis by Christopher Andrews at Cambridge University that gathers and synthesizes the data of the last nine decades on the human response to the YD in northwest Europe. Although understanding his work can be a tough slog for a non-scientist, Andrews’s careful narrative illustrates human responses to past climate changes, not only to the sudden cooling of the YD but also to the warming periods that preceded and followed it: “logistical mobility” (hunkering down) when the cold snap occurred; and “residential mobility” (a moving household) during warmer periods.8 Of course, Andrews’s thesis is far more complex than what I can outline here, and Andrews himself points toward numerous controversies and complexities, especially when he compares data sets from northwestern Europe with those from what is now the South of France and Northern Spain.9 Complications notwithstanding, these two concepts of mobility are central to understanding how humans reacted to the YD cooling period, which impacted the entire planet, not just the European regions on which Andrews focuses. Ahrensburg is a place of long and deep shadows (see fig. 3), where the human impulse to hunker down took shape long ago. In the YD, people moved in different ways than they had during the Allerød. They made their tools more expediently and with greater waste and diversity.10 Gone were the days 5 Even today, it is Iceland’s national flower. when they could take their en6 Although Andrews is at times quite cautious about tire homes with them in the nomaking predictions (“The difficulties in formulating these predictions are rooted in the fact we are dealing madic, foraging culture affordFig. 1: Þorvarður Árnason, Dryas octopetela, 2009. with extinct hunter-gatherer populations with no real ed by a warmer, more generous Photograph, Nikon D810. comparable modern examples with which to relate, especially populations that make extensive use of stone climate. Now more sedentary in tool technology, a technology that represents a signifII. response to climate change, they icant proportion of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic material culture. This issue is impossible to resolve, hence, thought and planned carefully many of the theories and models for understanding prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations are based TO SEE FOR MYSELF a landscape where humans met with cli- before striking forth with their purely on estimations, and best guesses” [Andrews, mate change long ago, I travel to a town located on the northeast weapons and tools from an estab“Human Responses,” 28]), his thesis constitutes a substantive coming-to-terms with behavior prediction theoutskirts of Hamburg, Germany, called Ahrensburg. The culture lished home site.11 ories based on tool assemblages (see ibid., 28–82). In this new environment of in which people responded to climate change is named after this See also Andrews, “Human Responses,” 137. 7 place. Evidence for the existence of Ahrensburg culture was first advancing ice, great cold, reindeer, 7 Ahrensburg culture or Ahrensburgian (c. 12,900– 11,700 BP) was a late Upper Paleolithic nomadic huntuncovered here by an amateur archeologist named Alfred Rust and white flowers, their response er culture (or technocomplex) in north-central Europe (1900–1983) in the 1930s. was technological and cultural. during the YD. When I step off the train platform at Ahrensburg, it’s a thir- The home fires stayed more often 8 Andrews, “Human Responses,” 29. ty-minute walk through a middle-class neighborhood to the in one place, with a turn toward 9 See ibid., 31, 135. Concerning southern populations, Tunneltal, a riverine feature formed during the YD where Rust lithic complexity that, the evidence Andrews states, “Populations in the south were distinctly more residentially mobile during the YD and and others found evidence of the reindeer hunters who had seems to suggest, remained intact more logistically mobile during the Allerød and parlived here then (see fig. 2). The ice-bitten land of that time was not only throughout the YD but ticularly the PB” (ibid., 229), although he immediately and characteristically cautions that “the smaller sample different than it is today, yet many underlying geographical possibly into the warmer Preboresizes of the southern European data” (ibid., 229) must 12 be accounted for. features of 12,900 to 11,700 years ago remain intact. What I see al (PB) period that followed. The painstaking increments, accompanied by academic controversies and political shocks — the conditions of a rapid alteration in climate that could assist us as we witness the changes in our own climate happening right now.6

10 See ibid., 38. 11 See ibid., 77. 12 See ibid., 29–35; Andrews acknowledges and summarizes the twentieth-century work of his predecessors, especially Lewis R. Binford.

41

Fig. 2: Robert Boschman, Ahrensburg Tunneltal Entrance, 2019. Photograph, Nikon D810.

3

ROBERT BOSCHMAN

possibility of this latter development mystifies Andrews, and points perhaps toward future investigations and discussions.13 Questions form for me as I hike through the old forest covering the Ahrensburg Tunneltal: · How do we all adapt to our own abrupt climate changes without turning on each other, without falling into deadly habits — even as we already see desperate migrations searching for refuge, shelter, and community? · Are we witnessing a time of increasing residential mobility, as humans take up whatever they can and move in family and community groups, but simultaneously a time of logistical mobility, as attachment increases to a perceived historical homeland? · Can we as a species, now in our billions, manage such changes with cooperation, justice, and even kindness? · Will we, on the whole, find ways to share? III.

IN SCHLESWIG, a Baltic coast community an hour by train from Ahrensburg, I visit the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum. I want to discover more about Ahrensburg culture as well as the cultures that came before and after, including our own (see fig. 4). The results of Alfred Rust’s initial discoveries about the humans who dwelt in this area in the YD, which Roveland argues were misrepresented by the Nazis, are on display here, a caustic reminder of how discovery is vulnerable to the politics of hunkering down.14 Alternative facts, fake news, coercions, walls, deportations, separations, and environmental crises that overwhelm populations — these aren’t new things. Right here in Schleswig one of my students, Jan-Henrik Heimann, has just purchased a house close to the Schlei fjord, only to find that the water and shores are inundated with microplastics and the whole community is in a panic, a panic that spreads to national proportions in media outlets throughout Germany. A new parent, he investigates “the Schlei Incident” and writes a paper about his findings for the class I teach in Environmental Humanities at the University of Kiel. Along with his neighbors, he discovers that the local sewage plant, mandated to treat grocery waste since 2006, was infected with microplastics over a two-year period. ReFood, the company that supplied discarded food for treatment and release, did not remove any plastic wrappings or containers. The government plant, for its part, neglected to check before they “blindly pumped [ReFood’s deliveries] into their digestion tower.” As my anguished student documents, 500 tons of shredded white plastic has become part of the “water mass” and has “polluted the beaches and the shoreline, got entangled in the reed, and [is] found nearly everywhere in the fjord.” What many now call the Anthropocene is merely a way of acknowledging how our species alters the

CLIMATE SNAP: AT THE SIGN OF THE WHITE FLOWER

Fig. 3: Robert Boschman, Ahrensburg Forest, 2019. Photograph, Nikon D810.

environment — the soil, water, other life forms, the air. Humans exist in a network of relations over long periods of time; we leave our traces behind. The museum at Schleswig, housed in ancient Gottorf Castle, demonstrates clear awareness that twenty-first-century Europeans live on the surface of the past lying in the strata beneath their feet (see fig. 5). The EU 13 See ibid., 141. In the southern parts of Europe, for initself — an idea broached by a stance, there is evidence of climate instability during French diplomat working in colthe PB, regarding which Andrews makes this fascinating statement: “Estévez (2005) and Marín-Arroyo and laboration with a German durGonzález Morales (2009) suggest a rapid decrease in temperatures during the PB, caused by the sudden ing the Weimar Republic, only interruption of the North Atlantic oceanic circulation 15 to be crushed by fascism — is from 11,000 to 8000 cal BP, might have caused a catastrophic reduction of terrestrial resources that in turn built atop many layers of distinct could have dramatically affected the Cantabrian human yet connected geo-human histopopulations. This kind of climatic instability could have been the cause of the collapse in the ungulate popries. In the museum’s deep hallulations that were simultaneously being overhunted ways and chambers, where like a by human populations in some regions. Marín-Arroyo (2013) believes this kind of rapid resource depletion palimpsest the accreted strata of would have forced human groups to migrate to other, less affected, areas for survival. This is one example humans’ lives, communities, and of the effects of the climatic instability during the PB cultures are displayed, I can see …, which may be responsible for the almost universal evidence of major shifts in subsistence and settlement the YD in a different way than strategies during the Early Holocene rather than the generally more climatically severe YD” (ibid., 244). what I experienced at Ahrensburg. Here are representations 14 For the impacts of Nazism on Paleolithic digs in Northern Germany during the 1930s, see Blythe E. Roveland, and re-enactments, old photos “Contextualizing the History and Practice of Paleolithic and diagrams and sculptures, deArcheology: Hamburgian Research in Northern Germany” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 2000); picting what we know about how and Blythe E. Roveland, “Reflecting upon Archaeological Practice: Multiple Visions of a Late Paleolithic Site humans responded to a climate in Germany,” in Ethnographies of Archaeological Pracsnap when massive ice sheets retice: Cultural Encounters, Material Transformations, ed. Matt Edgeworth (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), emerged from the North. 56–67. Also worth noting is Brian Fagan’s Grahame The museum visitor can see, Clark: An Intellectual Biography of An Archaeologist (New York: Routledge, 2018), in which he describes actually quite far down in the Rust as having “a violent antipathy to Nazis” (93). layers, this time of the YD when

15 See Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2018) for a description of the diplomatic relationship between Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, as well as Aristide Briand’s “idea to form an association of European states that would foster political and economic integration” (ibid., 91).

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a small white member of the rose family appeared as a herald of change. In geo-historical terms, it happened abruptly, and our human forebears living in this region dealt with it. I can see their heads rising up slowly through rust-colored reeds (see

fig. 6); they seem to wear reindeer antlers and masks. I imagine small white flowers appearing everywhere. But then the local white plastic present loudly intrudes, and any thought of white flowers as prehistoric markers fades back to the underworld.

Fig. 4: Robert Boschman, Composite: Layered Image, 2019. Photograph, Nikon D810. Fig. 5: Robert Boschman, White Rose Composite, 2019. Photograph, Nikon D810.

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ROBERT BOSCHMAN

Fig. 6: Robert Boschman, Stellmoor, 2019. Photograph, Nikon D810.

CRITICAL ZONES – CLIMATE SNAP: AT THE SIGN OF THE WHITE FLOWER

6

A

C

B

Landing on the Terrestrial Volcano

1 See Werner Herzog with codirector and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, Into the Inferno (Netflix, 2016), 104 min. 2 See Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 106. First published in French as Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter ein politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2017). 3 See Gísli Pálsson, Down to Earth: A Memoir, trans. Anna Yates and Katrina DownsRose (Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2020). Originally published in Icelandic as Fjallið sem yppti öxlum: Maður og náttúra (Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2017). 4 Páll Skúlason, Meditation at the Edge of Askja (Reykjavik: Háskólaútgáfan, 2005).

Karen Holmberg AS WITH OUR far longer-term experience of volcanic eruption, an uncanny discomfort of the Anthropocene is the perception of large-scale geological transformation on the human timescale. Climate change provides an existential sense of the earth being in revolt. How we image and imagine this is important. Ice is at the forefront of the Anthropocene imagination of earthly revolution. We closely monitor ice shelves and the iceberg calving that is reducing them. We hold funerals for melting glaciers. We fetishize polar bears on shrinking ice. Is there a volcano that can help update the Vesuvian metaphor of how nature and the human engage in the twenty-first century? Yes. Imagery of the lava lake at Mount Erebus in Antarctica is stunning as well as pointed in ways possibly not explicitly intended (see fig. A).1 The molten lava, seen from above with only a smattering of ice near it, feels ominous. Melting polar caps will rewrite world maps as we know them. Erebus, with its ice caves juxtaposed with lava, is to me a graphic visual metaphor of endangered ice. 46

Other volcanoes also capably embody contem- The Mars Ice House was the winning design porary issues, anxieties, and tensions. Mount of a NASA competition for a 3D-printed habiTaranaki in New Zealand is a very Anthropocene tat made of ice by robots (see fig. C). In the devolcano. Granted “personhood” in a move to ac- sign, ice — at risk from us on Earth — serves as knowledge its sacredness to the Maori, the volca- protection from radiation on Mars. The design no now has legal protection in a court of law that places it on the flanks of Alba Mons where, spechumans can invoke on its behalf. Mauna Kea is ulatively, the caves and lava tubes of the volcaanother; scientific desire to construct the Thir- no may offer further shielding from radiation. ty Meter Telescope and indigenous cosmologies A more recent design, the Mars X-House, reloof the volcano’s sacredness clash acerbically on cates the habitat away from the volcano to the the Hawaiian volcano. Mauna Loa, the volcano “equinoctial” region of Mars — to use early volin Hawaii from which the carbon dioxide measu- canologist Alexander von Humboldt’s preferred rements that comprise the Keeling Curve are tak- word for the equator — and constructs it from en, is most certainly one of our most iconic con- volcanic basalt. The premise of Mars colonizatemporary volcano metaphors in its relationship tion is the concept that the Earth will eventualto technology, climate, and ice. Through Mauna ly become a locus of uninhabitable nature. The Loa we know that emissions from the use of fos- Martian volcano has everything to do with our sil fuels are driving our atmospheric carbon diox- odd thoughts about the Earth in that sense. That ide ever higher, which in turn increases surface which often endangers us here (the volcano) and temperatures and threatens the cryosphere. that we endanger (ice) will somehow save us. There is also Alba Mons (see fig. B). It is on Bruno Latour asks us to decide where to land Mars and yet it is a volcano that has everything when we come down to Earth.2 I might choose to do with our current earthly relationship. to land on Mars, though. This is not because I

D

E

FIGS: A—Clive Oppenheimer, the lava lake within the maw of Mount Erebus, Antarctica, December 28, 2008. Photograph. The pulse of the volcano manifests in a periodic rise and fall of the lava lake, accompanied by shifting proportions of magmatic gases seen here emanating from the margins of the lake. B—The Alba Mons, located in the northern region of Mars, is unique in shape and structure and has no analog volcano on Mars or Earth. It was the proposed

think that we should live there; I see Mars colonization as traitorous to the Earth that created us. Could I land there in protest, though, to highlight all that is currently alarming with our relationship to the Earth? If the thought game does not permit such a thing, I can find a place on our own planet. To better envision our earthly relationship between volcanoes, ice, and human life there are few better natural laboratories than Iceland, for example. If one wants to get “down to Earth” in thinking through environmental change via experiences of stones that speak and glaciers that weep in the context of the eruption that covered the island of Heimaey in lava, Iceland amply permits this.3 Philosophically, Iceland also allows for poignantly beautiful reflection via “meditation at the edge of Askja” 4 in which the volcano incorporates the external reality of geological power as well as

its very individual, phenomenological elements. We could all learn from Askja. In the end, though, I will choose to crawl inside the Critical Zone just a little. I would like to slip under its skin in a way that allows a sense of contact with all that has been in the past and yet does not negate the role of technology and a desire for an inhabitable future nature. For me, this comes in the marriage of the prehistoric creativity embodied by rock art within a cave located in the water-worn plug of an ancient, extinct volcano with the immersive imaging technology permitted us by continually evolving forms of photogrammetry, 360-degree photography, and virtual reality (see figs. D–F). The cave is located on a coastline in Patagonia where glaciers retreated, sea levels rose, and nearby volcano — Chaitén — erupted repeatedly and regularly. It erupted again in 2008 unexpectedly and became

site of the Mars Ice House prior to the Mars X-House design. C—The Mars Ice House on Alba Mons volcano. SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture) / Clouds AO (Clouds Architecture Office). D|E—Andres Burbano and Karen Holmberg, Double-Sided Immersion, 2019. Rendering of the installation by Pierre Puentes utilizing photogrammetry and drone imagery of the Vilcun rock art caves and their coastal location near the Chaitén volcano.

the site of disaster. The town of Chaitén, however, is now the center of a creative explosion through a literary festival held on the eruption anniversary, a new geological awareness and interest amongst residents, and the creation of a museum to display — amongst other items — the product of art therapy aimed at helping with the trauma of an Earth that revolted. It is the site of millennia of ongoing creative involvement with a dynamic nature. It is surviving. A cave is sometimes used as metaphor for something we should escape from or that which we have outgrown via technology. I personally would prefer to creep inside one — particularly if it is volcanic — and learn what it might have to say rather than hurtle toward a multi-planet future for our species. It will take creativity to live on a future Earth. It always has, though. This is a constant of the past, present, and future.

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Around the Pluriverse in Eight Objects: Cosmograms for the Critical Zone John Tresch Antechamber: How to Do Things with Worlds

1

2

WHAT MIGHT THE UNIVERSE look like, seen from the Crit- Science, like other ways of worldmaking, also produces cosical Zone? There shouldn’t be anything strange about the ques- mograms: from Francis Bacon’s boat passing beyond the piltion, since this is where we’ve always been: stuck down here in lars of Hercules in the frontispiece of The Great Instauration the mud, despite visits to the moon and stratosphere. But the (1620), to Auguste Comte’s positivist calendar (1849), Charles question of how to represent the universe from ground level is usually Darwin’s speculative tree (first sketched in 1837), and Dmitri passed by in favor of stunts and special effects. Philosophers and Mendeleev’s periodic table (1869), right up to the mass-audiscientists climb imaginary look-out towers to give us the uni- ence pop cosmologies of Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard verse as angels, aliens, or gods would see it: from up above the Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the Large Hadron Collider Earth, or up above the entire system of systems, bound and con- — the massive bounded cathedral that tests and confirms physcentric when we were medieval, and aimlessly scattered when we ics’ “standard model.” 2 All these cosmograms depict in different ways and with variable effects the order of the universe. thought we were modern. Beyond the question of their content and aesthetics, we can The exhibition Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics asks how we can rethink our science, politics, and art. How can ask why these cosmograms were made, by whom, and in rewe represent the shifting universe to ourselves, from the point sponse to what historical pressures. Where are they placed and of view of terrestrial beings — grounded in a territory, in vi- how are they distributed? What theory of representation do tal, messy, gravity-bound interdependence with infinitely nu- they imply? Above all, what do they do — how do they promerous but equally earthbound others? How do we reposition pose, institute, challenge, satirize, critique, prop up, or quietly ourselves in relation to, and within, a cosmos where over two reinforce an order of the universe? To help us think through how to compose a new cosmohundred years of entrenched policy are steadily eroding and volatilizing the self-regulating cycles of air, soils, rock, water, logical dispensation, I’ll invite you into an imaginary chamber, a memory theater, a virtual exhibition space, a mental museand organisms? A shift of reference is required — to take on the careful- um, of cosmograms from the past. Our quick tour around these ly established facts and mappings of the Critical Zone scienc- landmarks will prepare us to draw the map of relations for toes without allowing them to float in the untethered, dead, and day’s puzzling cosmological conjuncture. Looking at cosmoneutral space of “abstract science.” If we think about how to grams as they perform cosmological arrangements shows us how map the emerging cosmos in a way that acknowledges all its to do things with worlds. As we strive to get out from under the impossible view of scidifferences of temporal and geographical scale, and that recognizes our profound involvement with the objects it studies, we ence as a unified and otherworldly knowledge that miraculousmight look at how this has been done in the past. How has the ly grasps the stable truth of a reality out there, we can plot some significant inflection points: those which show how one cosmoluniverse been drawn together in a single object or image? Aiming at what I see as the target of this exhibition, I sug- ogy came, in many crucial domains, to gain an ascendancy over gest we consider earlier cosmograms, or representations of the all others, or rather inserted itself as more fundamental. We universe: objects that convey what the cosmos contains, its in- might grossly summarize this cosmology as “scientific.” With ter-relations and hierarchies, its history and direction, and hu- slightly higher resolution, this “major” cosmology presents the mans’ place within it. We can inspect both familiar Western cos- universe and knowledge of it as mechanical, material, and objective mograms and those less well known to us, asking about the — MeMO, for short (the reductionism is a feature, not a bug).3 stories they tell and the maps they draw, joining living people Through what concrete representations did this cosmology, this to others, to the land, and to an- “naturalist” ontology, impose itself on the universe, to the point See Helen Verran, “A Story about Doing ‘The Dreamcestors, and tracing their meta- that it became commonsensical, the inevitable and self-evident ing,’” Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 2 (2004): 149–64; physical topologies — as in Aus- foundation for different and varied systems of meaning, symPhilippe Descola, “La fabrique des images,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 30, no. 3 (2006): 167–82. tralian Yolngu paintings of the bols, beliefs, values? With what other “minor” cosmograms — See Gabriel Popkin, “Catching ‘Particle Fever’: Docoffering up other ontological possibilities, both from within Dreaming.1 umentary Gives Physics Fans a Look inside the Large Hadron Collider,” Science News 185, no. 5 (2014): 28.

3 See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, vol. 1 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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Fig. 1: Zhang Heng, Directional Seismograph, 132 CE.

the West and beyond — did it contend, generating what clashes and truces, acknowledgements and denials? Above all, what do we do with this cosmology now? The scientific “view from nowhere” — with its image of knowledge as pure, abstract, and free of history and value, unbound from ethics and precaution — encourages a relation to our planet that neglects the very ground on which we stand. But we vitally need well-constructed facts to see the processes at work and test possible outcomes of further interventions. We step lightly on our tour of cosmograms; it shows the modern, naturalist cosmos as just one among many others, and gives an attentive ear to other ways of putting the universe together. This means taking seriously the different worlds that make up what William James in 1907 called “the pluriverse.” James wondered why philosophers and scientists have been obsessed with the idea of one, single, unified reality. Why, he asked, should the world be just one; “why is ‘one’ more excellent than ‘forty-three,’ or than ‘two million and ten’?” 4 Why not eight?

Our sampler extends back about two millennia, roughly unfolding with a convenient historical sequentiality — though having them all here, under soft lights in a darkened room, warps the timelines and hints at how these eras and collectivities remain present, at work on each other. In these eight image-objects our own planet is palpably present, as is the puzzle of how the “external” world is already inside us, and how our internal worlds are grounded in what’s outside. Any livable picture of our universe has to start and end here. I. Seismoscope

THE FIRST OBJECT stands about three feet tall, a metal, egglike vessel on an octagonal base. Eight dragons face downward around its shell toward eight small frogs looking up with open mouths (see fig. 1). It is said to have belonged to the court of the Chinese Han emperor, and made by the astronomer Zhang Heng in 4 William James, “Lecture 4: The One and the Many,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Think132 CE — on the opposite side of

ing (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1907), 49– 63, here 51. See also Martin Savransky, “The Pluralistic Problematic: William James and the Pragmatics of the Pluriverse,” Theory, Culture and Society (July 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419848030; MaryJane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

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Fig. 2: Digeo Ribero, Carta universal en que se contiene todo lo que del mundo se ha descubierto fasta agora, 1533. Reproduction, 58 × 140 cm.

5

6

7

the Earth from the Mediterranean, where the Greek word cosmos was first being recorded.5 In their 2002 book The Way and the Word, Nathan Sivin and Geoffrey Lloyd compared and contrasted ancient Greek and Chinese views of the universe in the five hundred years around the start of the Common Era — along with the social and institutional forms that shaped them.6 In the cities of the Peloponnesus, the Greek gods — embodying natural forces in capricious anthropomorphic figures — were giving way to naturalistic notions: physis, arche, logos, and cosmos, an orderly whole. Lloyd explains that the variety in pre-Socratic and AtheSee Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Physics and Physical Technology, part nian philosophy had everything 2, Mechanical Engineering (Cambridge: Cambridge to do with the setting of the AgUniversity Press, 1965), as well as vol. 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (Camora, where wealthy landownbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 624, 644; Seth Stein and Michael Wysession, An Introduction to ers shopped for tutors for their Seismology, Earthquakes, and Earth Structure (New sons. The period’s explosion of York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002). conceptual innovations — makSee Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and ing sense of the cosmos through the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). stasis and change, the one and Marilyn Shea, “Historic Beijing in Pictures ‘Chinese Asthe many, appearance and realtronomy’,” May 2007, http://hua.umf.maine.edu/China/ ity (atoms, elements, or numastronomy/tianpage/0012ZhangHeng6539w.html. Does it matter that no pictures or detailed descriptions bers) — resulted from philosoof the Han seismoscope exist in ancient sources, and phers trying to best their rivals in that the current form is a mid-twentieth-century invention? Undoubtedly: promoting this cosmic object as a a competition for teaching jobs. precursor to a national tradition of science is itself a cosmological intervention, to ground current visions By contrast, Sivin shows, in of progress in a heralded past. On the recreating of national histories of science worldwide, see James Delbourgo, “The Knowing World: A New Global History of Science,” History of Science 57, no. 3 (2019): 373–99; on Earth science and empire, see Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

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Ancient China from the era of Han unification, philosophers emphasized the continuity and unity of tradition and the wisdom of ancestors. Natural knowledge was supported by a vast state bureaucracy with extremely difficult entrance exams. Mastery of tradition, not innovation, was valued. Ancient Chinese cosmology merged Confucian ethics and Taoist metaphysics, built around the analogy between body, state, and cosmos. These three levels of reality were in close correspondence, united by the energy of chi, cyclically passing through the five elements or states. The emphasis was not on causality but on resonance among different domains of reality. Coordinating these cosmic domains was the emperor, who maintained earthly harmony through rituals seasonally repeated and built into the forms of temples and cities. The Mandate of Heaven confirmed the emperor’s rule: no catastrophes meant he was doing his job. Zhang Heng’s seismoscope contained a pendulum on a wire so sensitive it could register tremors in the earth at a great distance. When it picked up vibrations, a marble dropped out of one of the dragons’ mouths and plonked into a frog’s, indicating the direction of the tremor. As one story goes, one day the “ping” of one of the marbles was heard, but members of the court felt nothing; a few days later a “a runner arrived from a village 400 miles away to inform the Emperor that his area had been devastated by an earthquake” — for which the emperor had already prepared assistance. This device, like many other cosmograms, involved action at a distance in the service of an empire.7

JOHN TRESCH

Fig. 3 a: Códice Tonalámatl de Aubin (sixteenth/seventeenth century), fol. 13. Originally composed of 20 sheets, each ca. 24 × 27 cm.

II. Padrón Real

BUT THIS DOESN’ T MEAN that wherever there is a cosmogram, there is cohesion and stability. On the contrary, cosmograms are often produced out of fearsome social, conceptual, and physical conflict. They may aim to unify, but they just as easily provoke disharmony or serve as the stage for deep disagreements. At the start of the sixteenth century, imperial technologies for mapping the so-called New World and solidifying Spanish rule stirred a cosmopolitical clash in Seville. As Spain took on the Atlantic, the Casa de la Contratación de las Indias (the House of Trade of the Indies) was founded in 1503 under Queen Isabella to get a grip on overseas exploration and accumulation, and to collect taxes and duties. Navigators took an oath to report any new lands or resources they discovered and faithfully inscribe them on the Padrón Real, a secret world map. Our next exhibit is an English copy, carefully rolled out for inspection (see fig. 2). There was great disagreement about what the map would contain and how to assemble it. Sebastiano Cabot, the returning Pilot Major, clashed with the court cosmographers, led by Alonso de Chaves. The court cosmographers preferred astronomical methods, offering a view from above on a flattened homogeneous space. Cabot preferred portolan charts and measures based on dead reckoning, with trajectories marked by compass directions taken from various landmarks: a more practical, rule-ofthumb method, mapping from down in the midst of things.

Fig. 3 b: Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (Mexico, ca. 1581–84), fol. 242r. Franciscan friars burning traditional books and clothes.The images in the fire represent the destruction of the old gods whose masks correspond to the twenty signs of the Tonalámatl.

The Padrón Real was forging a new social order within Spain, defining a geographic, legal, religious, geopolitical, intercultural space — and extending it around the planet. Yet, it was also a site for marking differences among multiple users, groups, and powers — monarchs, pilots, astronomers, God. A cosmogram may appear united while holding together opposed trajectories. The lawsuit between the pilots and the cosmographers was unresolved.8 The stakes of the conflict rise when our perspective shifts to New Spain itself, where the conquistadors brought the crown and cross down on entirely different cosmological orders. Mayan and Aztec cities were already arranged as maps of quite different heavens and subterranean realms; calendars, as in the Aubin Tonalámatl, showed the deities, plants, and animals ruling over each day and each thirteen-day period.9 The Spanish sailors were followed by priests; Franciscans erected crosses and depicted themselves assisted by the Catholic Church and angels. Armed with blazing torches, they blasted the reigning deities, who — as this early sixteenth-century image shows — were none too happy at being swept away by fiery brooms (see figs. 3 a, b). While pilots and astronomers battled to draw the map of the New World in Seville, at the outer reaches of the empire, killing and 8 See Ursula Lamb, “Science by Litigation: A Cosmoenslaving the natives also meant graphic Feud,” Terrae Incognitae 1, no. 1 (1969): 4057; David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartogramapping territory, and burning phers (London: Routledge, 2000); Alison Sandman, “Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Terriaway their gods. torial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 83–108.

9 Serge Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 98.

AROUND THE PLURIVERSE IN EIGHT OBJECTS: COSMOGRAMS FOR THE CRITICAL ZONE

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III. Thermoscope

IV. Cell

THE EXPLOR ATION OF the Americas occurred at the same SUCH UNIVERSES remained active throughout the era of extime as a search for ancient sources — Aristotle, Galen, Plato, ploration and conquest. After seeing images and objects under Iamblichus, and Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Great” — to lights in glass cases, we now enter a small space in a corner of restore lost learning. The steps that would be called “progress” our imaginary hall, with only a bed, a small table, and a prayer began with a return to the past. Magical and theurgical texts, bench. The early moderns were supposed to have turned away emphasizing neo-Platonic graduated emanations falling in per- from the celestial spheres toward the immediacy of this world, fection from a divine source, set the agenda for court culture looking outward, filling in every corner of the globe through exand solitary experiments — in Byzantium, then Italy, moving peditions, discoveries, and conquests. But for millennia, large north and west. Paracelsus drew new attention to materials by numbers of people retreated into convents and monasteries (and rigorously testing their capacities and combinations; his readers still do today). The cloisters remain — in monasteries and conmade the alchemical laboratory a space of both concrete discov- vents worldwide, and in pop-up ashrams and retreat centers — ery and spiritual enlightenment. The years around 1600 saw a many of them arranged as figures of heavenly realms and the rediscovery of atomism and mechanical philosophy, as well as routes toward them. new inventions and an intense pursuit of forms of nonverbal, ilThese sites of enclosure and inwardness accessed universal luminist knowledge of the origins and workings of creation. visions, producing dazzling cosmograms. Hildegard von BinThe cosmological images of the English physician Robert gen’s Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum, composed Fludd capture this moment’s mixtures. His celestial monochord from 1163–70) depicted the cycles of the seasons and human (see fig. 4 a) — an instrument he drew to connect the earthly labor, stages of sacred history, the cosmic form of the redeemmicrocosm to the astral macrocosm, tuned by the divine hand er — placing an image of herself in the lower left as the artto ensure the harmonies between above and below, light and ist, instrument, or vessel (see fig. 5 a). Monks in Tibetan linedark, heat and cold — was “the most exact symbol of the cos- ages paint mandalas as guides and records of meditative and mic nature and the figure (typus) of its truth.”10 Fludd saw his metaphysical states. Here the Amitayus, the Buddha of Limitimages operating on the imagination to access “the internal and less Life, is surrounded by eight others marking the earthly diessential processes of Nature”11 — while his contemporary Jo- rections, with sacred temples and teachers pointing toward enhannes Kepler, whose cosmological interventions were also fed lightenment (see fig. 5 b). by neo-Platonism, mocked Fludd’s images for lacking “certain We find these cosmograms in our monastic cell: a remote pockand astronomically demonstrated measures.” 12 et of the hall, not much larger than the size of a human body, lit Yet, Fludd’s devices were not merely imaginary. His celestial by candles, its quiet occasionally broken by solemn bells and monochord followed the soundings of a wooden one-stringed distant chanting. instrument. Another device he drew and built was a thermoV. Orrery scope (see fig. 4 b): a glass vial containing a liquid which rose and fell according to atmospheric heat and pressure, the changing proportions of cosmic forces. This technical apparatus, measur- AT THIS POINT we might be feeling a bit confused, after ing a “material” Critical Zone, was written into a macrocosmic jumping from one of these encapsulated universes to the otharray of spiritual powers, linking local conditions to the harmo- er. We’ve gone from the ritual and technical alignment of microand macrocosm in the Han empire, to clashes between astrononies of the universe. Fludd’s machine made visible the movements of a nonme- mers and pilots and the Aztecs and their gods in New Spain, to chanical universe. Even though Fludd’s Rosicrucian devices, and back to the paradoxical topolit was part of a lineage of inven- ogy of the vast inner universes of monasteries. But the biggest 10 Robert Fludd, Clavis philosophiæ et alchymiæ Fluddanæ (Frankfurt: Fitzer, 1633), 30. Translation from tion and experiment which, a few challenge is still ahead. As we approach the seventeenth century the Latin taken from Christoph Lüthy, “What Does a decades later, would give rise to and the coronation of MeMO — the “mechanical, material, and Diagram Prove That Other Images Do Not? Images and Imagination in the Kepler-Fludd Controversy,” in Robert Boyle’s air pump — an objective” cosmology of science — we have to keep in mind all Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, ed. Christoph Lüthy et al. exemplary apparatus of the “new these other worlds, these ways of knowing and being, without (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 227–74, here: 243. experimental philosophy” — thinking we’re finally moving into “the one real world.” Despite 11 Robert Fludd, Veritatis proscenium […] (Frankfurt: Fludd’s thermoscope held to- its appeals to reason, facts, and self-evidence, the scientific cosErasmus Kempfer, 1621), 36. Translation from the gether a very different cosmos: mos also needs work and action to hold it together; it needs to Latin taken from Lüthy, “What Does a Diagram Prove,” 262. emanationist, animist, participa- be built, instituted, promoted, defended, and it needs cosmo12 Johannes Kepler, Harmonices mundi libri quinque grams to do so. tory, intuitively grasped.13 [1619], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, Harmonice mundi, ed. Max Caspar (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940), 377. Translation from the Latin taken from Lüthy, “What Does a Diagram Prove,” 256.

13 See D. Graham Burnett, “The Cosmogonic Experiments of Robert Fludd: A Translation with Introduction and Commentary,” Ambix 46, no. 3 (1999): 113–70.

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JOHN TRESCH

Fig. 4 a: Robert Fludd’s celestial monochord in De metaphysico macrocosmi et creaturaru[m] illius ortu (Oppenheim, 1617), 90.

Fig. 4 b: Robert Fludd’s thermoscope in De philosophia Moysayca (Goudae: Petrus Rammazenius, 1638), fol. 2.

Fig. 5 b: Mandala of the Amitayus, Tibet, nineteenth century. Pigments on wood, ca. 31 × 31 × 3.8 cm.

Fig. 5 a: Hildegard von Bingen, Liber divinorum operum (early thirteenth century), fol. 38r. Hildegard von Bingen completed the first copy of the Liber divinorum operum in around 1173, but this illumination comes from a thirteenth-century copy known as the Lucca manuscript.

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Fig. 6: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (in which a lamp is put in place of the sun), ca. 1763–65. Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 203.2 cm.

The experimental and mechanical philosophy of Robert Boyle and his seventeenth-century colleagues at the Royal Society of London began to impose itself on reality through careful theatrically staged experiments, where gentlemen offered their assent to well-documented “matters of fact.” But this was just part of the story of how MeMO was enthroned. In 1687, Isaac Newton’s Principia proposed an axiomatically argued mechanical universe. His acolytes proclaimed the system in displays of falling bodies, levers, chemical explosions, and mechanical solar systems.14 Joseph Wright’s famous painting of popular Newtonianism, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (see fig. 6), invited emotional responses that helped make MeMO part of the furniture of bourgeois 14 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental domesticity. In this dense cosmoLife (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); gram from 1766, on loan from Simon Schaffer, “Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics,” Osiris 9 (1994): the Derby Museum and Art Gal157–82; Stephen D. Snobelen, “On Reading Isaac Newton’s Principia in the 18th Century,” Endeavour lery and standing at an impos22, no. 4 (1998): 159–63. ing 1.47 meters by 2.03 meters, 15 See Jesse Molesworth, “The Cosmic Sublime: Wright the white-maned natural phiof Derby’s A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery,” Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Socielosopher confidently expounds ty for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2015): 109–21.

celestial mechanics using a desk-sized model. At left, a patriarch takes notes in a ledger; at right, a young man looks on in fascinated perplexity, while the children at center are entranced by the show.15 As Simon Werrett argues, another pair of paintings by Wright highlight a further aspect of MeMO’s appeal (see figs. 7 a, b). In the two paintings, the fire from an erupting Italian volcano is visually nearly identical to the brilliant plumes of a firework display.16 The mechanical philosophy is naturalized, becomes nature, by substituting an artificially produced and controlled process for one which occurs spontaneously. The explosion is the same, all things being equal, though the omniscient creator has been decisively replaced by a human technician. VI. Earth Inside Out

FROM THE LATE eighteenth century, European engineers crisscrossed the globe, setting up frames and scaffoldings to extract the wealth of the soil, of human bodies, and of mines below the Earth’s surface. Their work obeyed an aesthetics of calculated efficiency — but the early nineteenth century was injected with the Urkraft (primordial force) pronounced by the German philosopher Frederich Wilhem Joseph Schelling. His

16 See Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Simon Werrett, “Picturing Pyrotechnics,” Public Domain Review, June 25, 2014, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturingpyrotechnics.

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Fig. 7 a: Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius eruption with a procession in honour of St. Januarius, 1778. Oil on canvas, 162 × 213 cm. Fig. 7 b: Joseph Wright of Derby, The Annual Girandola at the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, 1775–76. Oil on canvas, 138 × 173 cm.

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Fig. 8: Thomas Sopwith, Forest of Dean model, 1841, Oxford Natural History Museum. photo © Frederik Albritton Jonsson

Naturphilosophie (natural philosophy) began with an “Absolute” that was both spirit and matter, dividing and condensing itself into elements and minds, into objects and subjects — who one day would realize, in a higher state of reflection, the identity between consciousness and the world. Naturphilosophie was also an empirical research program, encouraging scientists to develop instruments to articulate the relations within nature.17 Alexander von Humboldt, patron saint of the Critical Zone, deployed his arsenal of instruments to map the relations within and between the ecological niches of the planet, driven in part by Schelling’s reassurance that the Earth’s endless variety was grounded in an original unity.18 In Humboldt’s famous image of Mount Chimborazo, in his Essay on the Geography of Plants 17 See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, First Outline (1805), each vertical column ofof a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). Originally pubfered the readings from one of lished in German as Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena: Christian Ernst Gabler, 1799); his geophysical instruments, like Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after the score to a natural and human Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008). symphony performed by virtu18 See Michael Dettelbach, “The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Work osic instruments. of Alexander von Humboldt,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 30, no. 4 (1999): 473–504.

To capture and proclaim this dynamic yet instrumentalized nature, utopian reformers in Paris, the Saint-Simonians, imagined a new temple to replace Notre-Dame. A forerunner to the Statue of Liberty, this giant woman-temple would have referenced all the religions of the world and harnessed light, electricity, magnetism, and music in a spectacle of technologically extended abundance and cosmopolitan harmony through industry.19 The slogan of this era, built into the international exhibitions, could have been: Art is nature continued by other means. The scaffolds that held up new panoramas also pried open the earth for intervention and extraction. The switch to coal power required maps to put this resource at people’s fingertips. They showed both abundance and limitation, as in Thomas Sopwith’s beautiful model of the coal reserves beneath the Forest of Dean (see fig. 8). As Fredrik Albritton Jonsson has explained, this 3-D, moveable map showed how much coal there was, and where; but it also revealed that its bounty was finite, as the Victorian engineer William Stanley Jevons warned — even as he provided the terms for analyzing economic exchanges within an endlessly

19 See John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Fig. 9: Henry B. Comstock, “Inside IBM’s World’s Fair ‘Egg,’” Popular Science (July 1964): 58f.

growing economy.20 By the end of the nineteenth century, fear of the Earth’s limitations was expressed in the thermodynamic fantasy of the heat death of the universe, and in the desperate imperial scramble to carve up the planet. This fear also summoned utopian visions of anti-imperial harmony, with the Earth’s peoples — known to Europeans by trade, war, and now “anthropology” — meeting and sharing the fruits of the Earth. The anarchist-geographer Elisée Réclus designed a gigantic globe for the 1900 World’s Fair: according to his plans, viewers walking up the inner walls of a celestial egg would look with intimate proximity upon the untrammeled and developed landscapes of the finite planet they shared, fulfilling his idea that “L’Homme est la nature pregnant conscience d’elle-même” (Humanity is nature taking consciousness of itself ).21 His globe was never built.22

VII. World-Monitors

IN TWENTIETH- CENTURY OBSERVATOR IES and control rooms, new means of bringing the world together appeared. Cameras, radars, and sensors transmitted signals to screens, and experts in perma-pressed shirts flipped switches and barked command sequences back into the system. The cybernetic vision of self-regulating feedback loops depended on its ontology of information, where every level of reality was signal and noise.23 The world eventually managed by IBM — and other “in- 20 See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Abundance and Scarcity in Geological Time, 1744–1844,” Nature, Action ternational business machines” of and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment, all sorts — also needed cosmoed. Katharina Forrester and Sophie Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 70–93, with grams. It had to be drawn, prethanks for the image and helpful discussion. sented, made persuasive, sold. 21 Elisée Réclus, L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 1 (Paris: LibraiHerbert Bayer, Buckminster Fullrie Universelle, 1905), 4. er, Charles and Ray Eames, and 22 See Soizic Alavoine-Muller, “Un globe terrestre Eero Saarinen drafted high-modpour l’Exposition universelle de 1900: L’utopie géographique d’Elisée Reclus,” L’Espace géographique 32, ern feedbacked visions. The no. 2 (2003): 156–70; Pierre Chabard, “Architects of Knowledge,” in Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge, ed. Eames/Saarinen partnership, Pasquale Galgliardi, Simon Schaffer, and John Tresch (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 53–76.

23 See Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2015).

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Fig. 10: Apollo 17, The Blue Marble, 1972.

sponsored by IBM and the US government, produced in 1959 the multi-media spectacle Glimpses of the U.S.A. at the World’s Fair in Moscow and, in 1964, in New York. The film was shown inside the “Information Machine,” a cosmic egg stamped with “IBM” on its shell, located at the intersection of Commerce Avenue and the Promenade of Industry (see fig. 9).24 Inside the egg, thousands per day watched seven screens showing representative Americans going about their days, and the information technologies that made it all possible. Such fusions of systems logic and screen-based spectacle reached an apogee with space flight and the moon launch, immortalized in the postcard sent back home: the Apollo’s-eye view of the Earth seen from above. This image, The Blue Marble (1972), shows our uncanny home and our watchful, cloudy superego (see fig. 10). It becomes an object of cozy adoration on Earth Day; it is painted in terrifying red to show impending apocalyptic temperatures in climate reports. It also appears as an elusive object at last under control, the ground of a united world of technical and capitalist exploitation, as well as a fragile being we must care for, a temperamental mother to appease, and a somber, eerie alien in a void staring back.25 VIII. (No) Exit: You Are Here

WE GOT UP there from down here, and down here we remain. The question of how to represent our cosmos not from outside and 24 See Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2, no. above but from below and within is 3 (2001): 6–29. all the more pressing as we see how

the detachment of MeMO and naturalism accelerate extraction and consumption, making our every action another blow against the planet, another grain on the tipping scale. How do we represent a nature that we are part of, alter by knowing it, and threaten with suffocation and catastrophe by our most trivial acts? This is the challenge of Critical Zones, of Gaia 2.0: to take on board all the sciences, instruments, monitors, and relays that MeMO provides, but without thinking we’re outside the system. How do we weave together all these temporalities and agencies in the tiny but united localities above and below the surface of the Earth? How do we also draw into our cosmogram human agencies, with their distracted inertias and entrenched commitments, and the ethical incitements and aesthetic conversions we will need to shake us free of our dependence on fossil fuels, and the logic of endless consumption, “growth,” and predatory accumulation? I can’t answer except to exhibit the eighth object, a recent cosmogram which visualizes our immersion in a range of temporal scales while fixed on a single Critical Zone. Every page of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014) is an illustration of the same corner of a house in New Jersey, where the artist grew up.26 Windows open onto a constantly shifting scenography, bringing in eras and actors from long before the house was built — and long after its disappearance (see fig. 11 a). Here juxtaposes all the times and beings that briefly march through it, with numerous lines of development, echoes, repetitions, calls and responses across millennia. Gradually you realize the main protagonist is time itself. It moves slowly and quickly, backward and forward, deep and shallow — always present, always other than itself. Re-terrestrializing also means re-temporalizing. Here shows the many times and worlds at work within, behind, and passing through our own (see fig. 11 b). Our tour through this hall of cosmograms for the Critical Zone has led us here. We try to build a universe while the memory, anticipation, or active presence of other worlds presses in around us. How do we grant each of them a genuine reality, a livable coherence? How do we acknowledge that we live in a pluriverse without descending into pure chaos or endless cosmo-clash? How do we position MeMO, with its powerful grips on the world, within a cosmos never fully contained in calculation, objectification, prediction, or control? The fraught, witty serenity of Here makes us step back into where we are, presenting other responses to an ongoing crisis than panic and alarm. Through its windows, we glimpse ways of waiting, listening, attending to time and its movements through us as we act. Soil, rock, air, water, plants, fear, hope, and time — the stuff of which universes are made.

25 See Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut: L’invention de l’environnement global (Paris: Seuil, 2014); Birgit Schneider, “Climate Model Simulation Visualization from a Visual Studies Perspective,” WIREs Climate Change 3, no. 2 (2012): 185–93. 26 Richard McGuire, Here (New York: Pantheon Graphic Library, 2014).

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Figs. 11 a, b: Richard McGuire, Here (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014), bison in 10,000 BCE and nuclear apocalypse in 2313. An artist book disguised as a graphic novel about one location over time.

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The Story So Far

Richard Powers A MAN LIES in bed in a house on the side of a mountain at latitude 35.658912, longitude 83.758362. The man is 62.13 years old. It’s the 45th day of summer — at least as measured by an increasingly obsolete calendar, 2,019 years after the one in which people once thought an epochal event took place, although everything about that antique calculation has since been revised. The mountain that the man’s 19.12-yearold house sits on is covered in second-growth forest less than a century old. The mountain itself dates to the Ordovician, 480 million years ago. The house sits 518.163786 meters above sea level, although that number is changing fast. The man holds still, even as every cell in him races in frenzied and improvised activity. The man is facing down an intractable problem. The problem itself isn’t terribly grave. His house is still standing. His fortune and family are (so far) intact. He’s not dying, not yet. He has simply been asked to convey, in 6,000 signs, what a story knows and what — if anything — stories might be worth. 60

Truth be told (the man thinks), stories don’t And in that precarious causal chain leading up to know anything at all. They’re protean and murky, crash or triumph, the story makes its meaning. morally ambiguous. They’re fantasies lost in a But no, the man at 518.163785 meters above morass of knotted values and shifting interpre- sea level thinks: “The metaphor is faulty.” The tation. The mind needs something firmer, less problem is, the winds that batter any story’s problematic and precarious to save it from its central character come from ever more charfate. Times like these cry out for observations acters, each of them whipping around, batand figures, unbreakable relationships, field tered by their own special storms. The winds measurements that one can conjure with. To an- (the man marvels) that threaten to snap such a other man in another place, looking for knowl- kite’s string are also being made by that kite itedge and a way to safety, someone else’s made-up self! Every value, every core belief that a characfable might be worth exactly nothing at all. ter might hold can be turned — in the crucible The man — the one in the bed on the side of experience and the unfolding play of the plot of the mountain — thinks: “What do all stories — against itself. And then what happens? have in common? Conflict,” he thinks. “UncerThe frenzied and improvised cells in the tainty,” for certain. “And comparison.” Not to man’s brain (never shaped for the strangeness mention characters that fight like kites on the of such a tangled thought) give the man a headwind, held for a moment by a string against a ache. So he stops writing, long enough to listen. force much stronger than them. A story (the Down below, at the foot of the mountain, his man decides) depicts the dozens, maybe hun- neighbors are arguing over the eight mass killdreds of crosswinds that make a person (not the ings that the country has suffered in the last man in the bed in the house on the mountain, three days. They are fighting about how to unbut perhaps a fair facsimile of him) snap or rise. derstand. They’re fighting about how to respond.

They’re fighting about the simplest facts, about what actually happened at each of these shootings, and why. Elsewhere, on other mountains across the troubled country, similar fights will end in even more gunfire. The man doesn’t want to think about this. He listens to the air rush through the trees. He hears two warblers calling blindly to one another from across the sides of a ravine. He hears a pileated woodpecker drilling for insects under the bark of a tulip poplar, a tree with woodpecker scars far older than the man’s grandparents. He hears half a dozen crows banding together to drive off some invisible mammal with designs on their nests. The man looks out on the mountains beyond his mountain. Fall will be a little late in coming, again this year. All the embattled flora and fauna of this region are marching slowly up the sides of the slopes, searching for respite. Those at the top have nowhere to go. It occurs to the man that there is a kind of conflict, a type of story that has mostly fallen

out of our repertoire of telling and hearing. The idea that meaning can come from a character at war within herself: this people see easily and readily believe. That what we humans call the world is being contested at every turn by persons whose needs are sympathetic, defensible, yet mutually incommensurable also makes fundamental sense to almost everyone. But there, at the top of the spine of the mountain chain, within walking distance of his own house, the man sees that third, vanished variety of story, the one we stopped telling ourselves a while ago, back when we thought that archaic conflict had been settled forever and we had won. Hours pass — even whole days — in the time it takes for the man to have these thoughts and to compose them into a little fable. And in those passing hours and days, there also pass 547.95 species, give or take. Along with them, another 71,233 hectares of primary forest disappear.

THE MAN IN the infant house at 518.163784 meters on the ancient mountain slips in just under the wire. It takes him precisely 5.999 of his allotted 6,000 signs to reach a simple conclusion, one that the crows and the woodpeckers and the second-growth trees already know, one that his neighbors will vehemently contest, and one that he himself might take issue with, as early as tomorrow: “A man lies in bed in a house on the side of a mountain at latitude 35.658912, longitude 83.758362” is a field measurement. “A man lies in bed in a house on the side of a mountain at latitude 35.658912, longitude 83.758362, facing extinction” is a story. And like it or not, the man and his measurements and the mountain and the neighbors and the forest as well as all that story’s readers are all a part of it.

AFTER ALL, what else do all stories have in common? They all end. 61

II.

1

Disconnected

2

Rachel Libeskind, Nature Owes You Nothing, 2019. Digital C-print for Banner printed on weatherproof polyester.

DISCONNECTED Our troubling disorientation and confusion would not last very long if we could reorient ourselves by surveying the shape of the land on which we finally have to settle. The problem is that we’re not able to land at all because modern humans, at the time of the Anthropocene, appear to be suspended over at least two different and incompatible definitions of the land.

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This is what is demonstrated in this section by two decisive chapters: one on the disconnection in space, the other on the disconnection in time. With Pierre Charbonnier, a French political philosopher, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s contrasts between the Global and the Planetary take on a new and tragic dimension: “The totalization of the globe, which once seemed to be opening new fields of exploration, is now closing in on us. The larger the world is, the more we suffocate in it”(Pierre Charbonnier). Charbonnier asks an apparently odd question: Where is freedom actually enacted? Politics is not only about humans in a vacuum: Freedom must have a place, a climate, a soil. Hence his question: Where do you actually exert your rights? As shown by Gerard de Vries, this was also a question raised by Montesquieu in the eighteenth century. Although his political theory of the climate might have been mocked by political scientists obsessed by the centrality of human agency, nobody today would find Montesquieu’s question moot: “Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result” (Montesquieu). What de Vries argues is that his definition of politics brings back the key question of the relations between land and people. Politics is always geopolitical. “Surely, it will require us to go beyond Montesquieu … But we owe it to the one planet we live on, Earth, where climate has to do with law and liberty.” What Charbonnier argues, however, is that what might have been thinkable in the eighteenth century is no longer possible because the world we live in and the world we live from have become utterly disconnected. This is what he calls the “ubiquity of the moderns.” “We modern people, heirs of the industrial and imperial impetus, therefore live not on one but on two territories: the legal and political territory of the national state, and the ecological and economic territory defined by the space required to mobilize the goods that we consume.” And he adds, “The disconnect between the official political space defined by borders and flags — the sphere where sovereignty asserts itself — and the ecological space that is required by our consumption patterns is even more spectacular when one thinks of the colossal fossil resources burned daily in terms of spatial equivalents, as the clever term 'ghost acres' invites us to do.” Is it at all possible to literally resettle politics away from its ghostly existence? Do we have any chance of reconciling the sources of our prosperity with those of our freedom? The amazing thing is that we aren’t only living in between two territories, but also in between two different

times. Timothy Mitchell is famous for having defined “the Economy” not as the real infrastructure of exchanges, but as the artificial invention, in the mid twentieth century, of a spurious infinity based on the availability of limitless oil and gas. In his beautiful chapter, Mitchell gives a new twist to his argument: “The economy is also a kind of time machine, a way of organizing our relationship to the future.” By way of the “alibi of growth” economists have managed to render acceptable the total disconnection between the present we live in and the future in which we will be forever obliged to repay our debts. “Uber eats the future” for good since the present value of its stock market share is based on the bet that all efforts of cities, taxi drivers, and citizens to live freely in the future will be thwarted. “The windfall represents the value of an encumbrance imposed on the firm’s future customers and workers. The company’s profits, and thus its shareholders’ dividends, depend on maintaining this burden.” The Anthropocene traps humans in between a real and a ghostly territory, a real and a ghostly future. Such a disconnection justifies paying new attention to the material components of the soil. This is why Steve Banwart, one of the Critical Zone scientists we are going to meet later, reminds us: Politics assumes sovereignty over a territory, but remains fairly silent about the exact nature and especially the durability of the soil. Hence the necessity of becoming materialist again by being a bit more down to earth. We can no longer take for granted what a ground is, especially if you look to how people in practice are deprived of their land (as Paul Jobin shows in the case of Taroko Gorge in Taiwan) or when suddenly a corporation abandons an uranium mine in Canada (as in the photo essay of Robert Boschman). As Montesquieu had anticipated, politics is really about making life last a little bit longer. He would surely have been very taken by the attention Matthieu Duperrex invests in the sedimentology of a place in the South of France: sedimentology being almost a synonym for the way laws of the land bind people and dirt. Something poets have always known, as Stefanie Rau reminds us by speaking, literally, in tongues, and that Romanticism, in the rendering of Joseph Leo Koerner, had explored through its peculiar sort of “geognosy.”

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“Where Is Your Freedom Now?”: How the Moderns Became Ubiquitous Pierre Charbonnier

1

2

WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS when, under the disinhibiting and exalting impulse of President Jair Bolsonaro’s speeches, a Brazilian latifundist clears a plot of land in the Cerrado or the Amazon and sets it on fire? It is very difficult to say, so numerous and tightly entangled are the causalities and interdependencies at play, but let’s try anyway. On the one hand we of course see the soybean–beef complex at work. This industry, heir to a long history of contempt for indigenous peoples, is a central branch of Brazilian agribusiness and is extending its influence into the deepest part of the state.1 The brutality of these land grabs thus prolongs the historical confrontation that has structured Brazil’s entire history: between the interests associated with extraction and development, and the fragility of environments characterized by extraordinary human and biological diversity. To the former, Amazonia appears as untapped wealth, a huge uneconomic waste, and therefore an area to be improved by a productive endeavor — the very type of endeavor that gave Europe its historical advantage. At the same time, these Brazilian fires are a fascinating and dramatic testimony to the ecological interdependencies that support the economic sphere. Two main flows of matter are involved in this case: a river of plant and animal proteins that flows from Latin America to Europe and other richest regions of the world to satisfy, if not their needs, at least the voracious expectations of their markets; and of course the disruption of the biochemical cycles of the Earth system caused by the CO2 emissions from fires, and worse yet, the way they reduce the forest’s atmospheric carbon storage capacities. Proteins and carbon, that is, what we eat and breathe: even though the former come as commodities and the latter does not, a set of extremely vulnerable material interdependencies emerges behind the incumbent economic order in place. And then there is also the diplomatic dimension of the issue. Some European powers, including France, have tried to exert pressure on the Brazilian government in the name of the heritage value of the Amazon and of respect for the Paris Agreement. To which Bolsonaro replied that it was unacceptable interference, akin to coloSee Roger Maioli, “Agribusiness against the Amazon,” nial paternalism, and that only September 2019, www.dissentmagazine.org/online_ articles/agribusiness-against-the-amazon. he could determine what would See Glenn Hurowitz et al., “The Companies behind the happen to those lands which, Burning of the Amazon,” https://stories.mightyearth. org/amazonfires/index.html.

3 For a brilliant glimpse of these issues, see Adam Tooze, “Notes on the Global Condition: Of Landscapes of Feed and Oceanic Dead Zones,” January 7, 2018, https:// adamtooze.com/2018/01/07/notes-global-conditionlandscapes-feed-oceanic-dead-zones.

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after all, are part of Brazil’s sovereign territory — a country that did not intervene to tell France what it should do in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In this situation, hypocrisy is twofold: Brazil pretends not to know that in the age of climate crisis, no space is absolutely separable from the others: while being a part of Brazilian territory, Amazonia is also a global common, as it provides an ecological “service” to all living beings. Europe, on the other hand, massively underestimates its levers of action on an economy for which it is the main outlet, and which it could therefore easily discipline.2 Thus, whether they like it or not, both encroach on the other’s territory — not to mention the legitimate claims of native communities — through production and consumption practices that are clearly out of phase with the borders that the various national jurisdictions are drawing. The fires that consumed Brazil in the summer of 2019 illustrated once more that the political economy of land and the Earth is both the most important and the most complex issue of our times.3 This is so because the threads one must pull to form an idea of it call into question the ordinary categories of political thought and conventional boundaries between disciplines. The categories of “international relations,” crises of parliamentarianism, global supply chains, and the Earth system are part of the same set of issues, and thus the same descriptive and theoretical narrative. Above all it must be understood that the course of human affairs and the flows of matter must be described together, that the former are much more material than previously thought, and that the latter are much more political. However, global history (the work of Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein in particular) has taught us that the destiny of men and women unravels on a profoundly unequal supranational stage, and environmental history has more recently shown that nonhumans also act on this stage. For several decades, the explanatory models of the social sciences have followed a vertiginous slope, marked by the expansion of analytical scales and by the intensification of interdependence. Historical events are set in economies and cultures marked by long-distance spatial projections that seem to invalidate the local scale, and since these events carry the — formerly silent and intangible — physical substrate of nature with them, nothing, not an atom of air or soil, remains outside this trajectory. In other words, the totalization of the globe, which once seemed

to be opening new fields of exploration, is now closing in on us. The larger the world is, the more we suffocate in it. A Tale of Two Spaces

YET DESPITE THE UNDENIABLE importance of these descriptions and analyses, what is lacking is a clear characterization of the territorial regime within which events such as these forest fires occur; an instrument to understand the geopolitical equivocation that marks the progressive extension of the economy’s borders and the globalization of the division of labor; in other words, an instrument that would make it possible to grasp the reciprocal alienation of territories within each other (to the benefit of some). The stalemate in which the power struggle between Europe and Brazil is locked, for instance, is partly due to the fact that each of these geopolitical actors encroaches on the other through channels that have no real legal translation: exchanging proteins for money or administering sovereignly one’s national territory at the expense of terrestrial ecological balances are activities that take place both within and outside the framework of the nation state and of the interplay between states. Bolsonaro’s relationship with Brazil’s own territory is obviously defined by its submission to the trade opportunities offered by its economic partners, and therefore to the extractive economic regime that subordinates its economic independence to the progressive decline of its ecological vitality. But as Europeans, our own relationship to our territory is marked by the same kind of discrepancy: we need, it seems, to devour spaces other than our own to keep a number of aspirations for comfort and growth afloat, while pretending to live in the protected and well identified political territory of our European “home.” And the case of Brazilian forests is of course only one of many examples of geopolitical discrepancies that we are unable to govern — or even to describe adequately. The disconnect between the official political space defined by borders and flags — the sphere where sovereignty asserts itself — and the ecological space that is required by our consumption patterns is even more spectacular when one thinks of the colossal fossil resources burned daily in terms of spatial equivalents, as the clever term “ghost acres” invites us to do.4 The “spatial economies” that imperial economies have begun to achieve by outsourcing certain territorially costly functions to their colonial outskirts or their underground should be taken literally. The modern West has historically been characterized by a strategy of escaping ecological pressures exerted by development, either by spatially displacing them in the form of ghost acres or by temporally postponing them (as in the case of climate risks or nuclear waste). In order to take these descriptions seriously, it is necessary to abandon, or at least relativize, the classic definition of space,

which is still used in reference to the “globalization” of trade. This language assumes that there can be only one territorial regime: that of more or less intense rivalry between different communities for a fundamentally unified, rare, and therefore disputed space. Military manoeuvres of conquest, commercial operations, games of influence, and inequalities are thus presumed to take place in this single homogeneous space, which is so self-evident that it hardly even needs to be mentioned. What is now referred to as the ubiquity of modern peoples designates, by contrast, their ability to settle simultaneously in two, albeit heterogeneous, territorial regimes, and no longer just one. Ubiquity is the disconnect between two ways of occupying space, and missing that peculiar property of our territorial regime hinders an adequate understanding of what is happening to us by eclipsing that reality. Intuition would have the territorial state as the baseline unit of our relationship to space. It is the custodian of legitimate force within its borders and of the ability to legislate on what happens there, and it is what absorbs feelings of national cultural belonging and what materializes in diplomatic meetings. It is this State that is drawn on maps, where we see these actors juxtaposed, differing in names and borders but alike in their legal and territorial constitution. And then, at the same time, there are territories that can be drawn on the basis of economic and ecological data: this is the amount of space needed to produce the goods that are consumed and to absorb the waste and pollution that are generated — a space much larger, in our case, than the territory that is officially conceived of as “ours.” For instance, the calculation of the ecological footprint was developed to estimate the extent of this space.5 However, this second type of territory is entirely indifferent to interstate boundaries, since it is mostly a product of a given society’s ability to concentrate wealth and to put pressure on the environment to extract its resources. We modern people, heirs of the industrial and imperial impetus, therefore live not on one but on two territories: the legal and political territory of the national state, and the ecological and economic territory defined by the space required to mobilize the goods that we consume. This would not be a problem if massive friction did not occur between these two territories, for the whole historical paradox of ubiquity is that the affirmation of universalist nation states as guarantors of individual freedom is contemporaneous with their projection across oceans, conducted to feed on vast movements of land dispossession. The rift between the formally emancipated subject of continental law and this “other citizen,” long locked into the 4 While he did not invent the term, Kenneth Pomeranz is economic and legal system of the one who pushed its analytical scope the furthest; see his The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and slavery, is one of the most glarthe Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). ing manifestations of ubiquity,6 5 See Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on Earth (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1996). 6 I am borrowing the expression from Silyane Larcher, L’autre citoyen: L’idéal républicain et les Antilles après l’esclavage (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014).

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and the political divide that separated the two for a long time was already a denial of their common geo-ecological belonging. Whether or not eighteenth-century philosophy is deemed to be responsible for this double standard that makes the heritage of the Enlightenment so complex,7 the fact remains that the attachment of the moderns to their territory, conceived as the foundation of their emancipation, clashes with the reality of ecological attachments. Fichte and the Geography of Freedom

7

8

THIS STR ANGE CONDITION, consisting of living in and off two spaces instead of one, has been identified for quite a long time by the tradition of political philosophy. For ubiquity theorists, the main challenge was generally to denounce the strategic exploitation of this dual territorial regime by its main beneficiaries, the great commercial empires. Thus Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), in his almost forgotten book The Closed Commercial State, published in German in 1800,8 saw no other way to establish the modern rule of law, and thus to give concrete expression to revolutionary aspirations for freedom and equality, than to close a country’s borders. This may seem strange, since universalism and cosmopolitanism are generally associated, but Fichte saw it as a logical consequence of modern aspirations. As Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) heir, Fichte defined his project as the introduction of reason into political relations: the State is a system of legal guarantees that determines the possibility for everyone to have their “own good.” Like his contemporaries, he meant by this not only all the formal freedoms that ensured participation in the public sphere, but also more material freedoms, such as access to property and to the product of one’s labor. In his view, what hindered this process of emancipation was the accumulation of extralegal uses, including international trade. Fichte argued that the establishment of the rule of law was founded on its ability to regulate not only civil relations between the governed and those in power, but also economic relations. He maintained that the division of labor and forms of exchange should be under the direct supervision of a regulatory apparatus capable of determining whether the principles of justice are respected. By contrast, international trade, being by definition located in the interstices of State courts, could but be a vector of disorganization, injustice, and looting. To integrate human interdependence with respect to the fulfilment of needs into the realm of law and reason, it is necessary to eliminate commercial practices that interpose themselves between one State and another, between one geographical area and another, and that proceed only through negotiaHere, I have Antoine Lilti’s book in mind, L’héritage des Lumières (Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 2019). tion, through a balance of power. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Closed Commercial Fichte therefore wanted to bring

State, trans. Anthony Curtis Adler (New York: SUNY Press, 2012). Originally published in German as Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (Tübingen: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1800). On the debates that led to this publication, see Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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together two regimes of spatiality whose dissociation constituted, in his view, a state of incompletion characteristic of the modern order with regard to the law and to exchange. Transnational commercial ventures, which can always benefit from a lack of protection for foreign workers or from the military weakness of coveted territories, therefore seemed to him to be incompatible with the fair distribution of goods. Drawing radical conclusions from his conception of justice and equality, Fichte then asserted that the State’s border regime must apply to both humans and goods, and therefore to flows of matter. Sovereignty, in order to play its role in the process of emancipation, must apply to things as it does to people, regardless. There are many historical reasons for his position, including the weakness of German foreign trade at the time, to which the expansion of British chartered companies already appeared to be a threat. But beyond these strategic rivalries, and beyond Fichte’s political conclusions which have become difficult to accept in this day and age — the closing of borders that he advocated was after all not a liberal way of protecting freedom, even though he was also one of the most fiercely anticolonial thinkers of his time — we need to bear in mind that the conquest of peoples’ political autonomy generated very profound reflections on their “productive independence.” As a thinker of freedom, the subject, and the nation, Fichte made himself a thinker of territoriality in just this one book, directly asking a question often dismissed by the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) movement: What is the geographical locus of freedom? What land does a community need to gain full access to the means of its emancipation? Fichte did what very few other philosophers have done: he demanded that freedom, which is often so abstract, be linked to an identifiable place. The conclusion that he drew from his reflections is somewhat disappointing, as it translates into a sanctification of the sovereign state, omnipresent in socioeconomic relations and prefiguring in some respects Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) vision of the state. But irrespective of the ideological implications of his conclusions, which were taken up by both the socialist movement and German nationalism, the question he raised is absolutely crucial, for it indicates that the trajectory of modern peoples cannot succeed without an answer to the question of ubiquity. In addition to the autarchy Fichte advocates, other options can of course be considered, such as the formation of a world state that would get to the root of the problem. But ubiquity haunts the modern condition in any case: as long as the political and legal autonomy of the West is based on a ghostly material empire (with reference to Kenneth Pomeranz’s ghost acres), territorial ambiguity and the injustices it produces will persist. The dislocation of geo-ecological and political territoriality is one of the key characteristics of the modern experience, and Fichte placed overcoming it on the agenda

PIERRE CHARBONNIER

of political thinking. It is now this imperative that we must remember, rather than the philosopher’s solutions. How to Get Out of the Double Bind?

BEFOR E ECOLOGICAL and climatic issues resurrected Fichtean reflections, another theoretical debate raised the issue of modern ubiquity. In the mid-twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), for example, analyzed in detail how internal tensions in the old European nations, caused by the emergence of a bourgeoisie that was religiously subject to the law of return on capital, found their expression in imperialism. Congested within the continent’s rigid borders, capital finally found openings in Africa and Asia, thus inaugurating a new geo-political phase. Arendt saw very clearly that this dynamic resulted not only from a logic of accumulation, but also from the ambiguities of “national identity”: “Of all forms of government and organizations of people, the nation state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely, and is only rarely, and with difficulty, won from conquered peoples. No nation state could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples, since such a conscience comes only from the conviction of the conquering nation that it is imposing a superior law upon barbarians. The nation, however, conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory.”9 The national principle is irrevocably a local principle: it cannot extend indefinitely because it encounters the reluctance of opposing feelings of belonging, and because its own energy lies precisely in the emphasis on regional exceptions. But this local principle has come to coexist with the demands of capital, which in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have multiplied post-hoc justifications for maintaining the myth of the civilizing empire. The political structure and the economic structure thus come to obey opposite constraints, one leaning towards limitedlessness, the other towards localization, and imperialism is the tension created by this living paradox. Imperialism is not only the projection of power beyond defined borders, but also the desperate attempt to hold together injunctions that are contradictory yet considered as equally vital. According to Arendt, racial ideology and the naturalization of inequalities soon emerged as one of the founding elements of this new regime of ubiquity, soon to be drawn into the total wars of the twentieth century.

Here, Arendt took up elements of thought from the work of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and Lenin (1871–1924), and her analysis of the disruptive tensions of market society was also very close to what Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) had put forth a little earlier. But none of these studies identified with such precision the increase in ubiquity that the imperial system constituted. And once again, it was the modern project of autonomy that was being challenged. Even though capital exports had temporarily reduced the internal tensions of the national body politic by artificially creating conditions for cheap supply, it soon emerged that there was not enough land to accommodate all the claims to sovereignty and freedom that were being heard in the community of nations. The situation we are facing today, which I have tried to illustrate briefly through the example of Amazon fires, no longer seems entirely novel. The territorial ubiquity that developed in the age of international trade and empires, the age of slave plantations, has only intensified, and it now appears in a cruder light than ever before. The old disconnect between the political-legal territory and the geo-ecological territory is now coming up against an obstacle that cannot be bypassed: this is no longer just a matter of human policy but also, and simultaneously, one of ecological policy. While the political economy of modern emancipation was able to cut itself some leeway by keeping the inhabitants of other lands in check, force can no longer suffice to hide the costs and unspoken aspects of ubiquity, because they are inscribed in the Earth itself, in its geology and in the movements of its inhabitants. The energy intensification of “developed” societies has created a huge gap between the traditional justifications for their historical destiny and their material substrate, resulting in a massive destabilization of present and future material living conditions. This is why it is difficult to imagine a common future that does not somehow involve resizing the ideal of autonomy. This is also why one of the questions of the present is less that of the nature and definition of freedom, than that of its location: Where is your freedom now? The inability of nation states to regulate their mutual relations and their future according to what they take from the territory of others (in the form of proteins, other resources, or CO2) cannot remain unsolved. The Fichtean proposal of autarchy is obviously no longer relevant, that of the world state is among past utopias and, between the two, polities may appear that are capable of formulating political ideals that can accommodate the fair and sustainable use of territories.

9 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 126f.

“WHERE IS YOUR FREEDOM NOW?”

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A

B

Extractivism in the Critical Zone Paul Jobin FORGED BY A MILLION years of geological activity, the Taroko Gorge on the eastern coast of Taiwan offers magnificent scenery and has become a hotspot for global tourism. Chinese tourists come en masse, acting as sentinels or a new type of invader, and creating an economic pressure that can influence elections. The Taroko Gorge can thus be considered as a destination emblematic of the geopolitics of tourism between Taiwan and China.1 This quandary of old geopolitics entangles with Gaia-politics, as redefined by Bruno Latour, for the Taroko Gorge is also a hotspot for geologists and the study of the Critical Zone. In May 2017, Bruno Latour and I had the opportunity to visit observatory stations launched for an ambitious research program on the Critical Zone and the carbon cycle, at the initiative of Niels Hovius, a researcher at the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany, in cooperation with Taiwanese researchers (see fig. A). Taiwan experiences greater erosion than anywhere else in the world; as a result, the island carries 70

1 See Ian Rowen, “Touring in heterotopia: Travel, sovereignty, and exceptional spaces in Taiwan and China,” Asian Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2016): 20–34. 2 Interview with Niels Hovius, Taroko Gorge, May 15, 2017, unpublished. Additional meetings with Hovius occurred in Taipei in December 2018 and October 2019. 3 See Bettina Engels and Kristina Dietz, eds., Contested Extractivism, Society and the State: Struggles over Mining and Land (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Anna Willow, Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes (New York: Routledge, 2018); Phillip John Usher, Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Alexander Dunlap and Jostein Jakobsen, The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and the work of photojournalist Garth Lenz.

much more carbon into the ocean, a hundred times more than the global average. The reason lies in intense seismic activity (the island is located between the Pacific and Eurasian plates), as well as exposure to typhoons, heavy rains, floods, and landslides. Hovius and his team aim at clarifying to what extent the Anthropocene exacerbates these inherent features. The whole operation consists of a total of twenty measuring stations, each equipped with a seismograph, an anemometer, a camera directed on the mountain to observe rock- and landslides, and a sensor measuring the river’s flow. The Taroko Gorge offers a spectacular change in the morphology of the terrain, partly visible to the naked eye. As Hovius sums up: “Here, we can see in a very short time a lot of phenomena that would take years to observe elsewhere.” 2 A few kilometers away from their observation stations, at the entrance of the Taroko Gorge, the firm Asia Cement operates a quarry of granite sand (see figs. B–E). However, some three hundred meters below are six villages of

the Sincheng Township, the majority of whose inhabitants belong to the indigenous Truku people. Each time there is a heavy rainstorm, a strong earthquake, or an explosion of dynamite, causing dust and hydrological pollution, inhabitants fear that the mountain will collapse onto the village. Since the beginning of operations in 1957, the mine floor has dropped from 776 to 295 meters above sea level. In April 2018, despite strong opposition of the Truku villagers along with environmentalists, the company was granted a twenty-year extension to keep digging to 120 meters above sea level. The mobilization of Truku people against this emblematic case of environmental injustice is also a fight against extractivism, a notion that points to the mania of capitalist industries for extracting underground resources to exhaustion or as long as the mining is cost-effective, weakening the geological structure of entire areas.3 The Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, passed in 2005, stipulates that the exploitation of aboriginal lands in Taiwan must have the consent of the

C

D

E

4 Ching-ting Huang (CET member), “Asia Cement Has Dug Sincheng for 20 Years” (lecture in Chinese at Tò-uat Café-philo, Taipei, July 24, 2019). Translated here from the Chinese. 5 “President issues apology to Aborigines,” Taipei Times, August 2, 2016. 6 See Marta Conde, “Resistance to Mining: A Review,” Ecological Economics 132, no. C (2017): 80–90.

aboriginal communities and provide adequate compensation to them. In addition, the Geology Act, voted into law in 2010, implies a control of mining activities by the government, especially around “sensitive geological zones” (dizhi mingan diqu). Although the concession granted to Asia Cement was due to expire in March 2017, the Ministry of Economic Affairs renewed this concession for another twenty-year cycle, without conducting any environmental impact assessment. The company maintains that the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law and the Geology Act are not retroactive. The current Mining Act, which dates back to 1930, is supposed to be updated, but the debate has gotten stuck in parliament. Since the mining company started to dig the mountain in 1973, it has compelled fifty indigenous families to move to the foot of the mountain. They have lost their cultivated land and hunting grounds, upon which they depended. After thirty years of struggle, only two of the families were able to retrieve their land ownership.

The hasty decision of the ministry to renew the company’s concession angered opponents of the mine. These include indigenous villagers and several environmental organizations, such as Citizen of the Earth Taiwan (CET). As one of them explains: “The mine conducts three explosions every weekday. Each time, the housewalls are trembling as if there was an earthquake.” 4 In June 2017, documentary filmmaker Chi Po-lin — whose film Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) had been a popular success – died in a helicopter crash near the mine, a tragedy that gave stronger impetus to the mobilization against the mine, marked by an important demonstration in Taipei (see fig. F). Some months later, in October 2017, the Control Yuan, the investigatory branch of the state, published its investigation into the Asia Cement case, clearly stating that the government and Hualien County had violated the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law. The ministry’s decision came after President Tsai Ing-wen had made a formal apology to the Aborigines in August 2016 for all of

FIGS: A— Bruno Latour and Niels Hovius in the Taroko Valley, May 15, 2017. B— Asia Cement’s Sincheng mine, June 22, 2017. C— Asia Cement’s mine, December 30, 2016. D — Asia Cement’s mine, February 4, 2017. E— Asia Cement’s mine, April 6, 2017.

their “unfair treatment … in the past four hundred years.” 5 This long-awaited apology was followed, in December 2016, by the launching of the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee, under the direct authority of the presidency. In April 2018, environmentalists held a press conference with lawmakers from different political parties — a rare event — to protest against the ambiguous attitude of the government on the issue of Asia Cement. With such a favorable political context, environmentalists have hoped for a halt to the exploitation of Asia Cement’s quarry in the Taroko Gorge and a drastic revision of the Mining Act. In March 2018, tripartite negotiations were started between representatives from the village, the ministry, and the company, and were chaired by the head of the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee (see fig. G). But the company argued that it has already provided enough compensation to the villagers for the usufruct of their land. It also emphasized that, in addition to the economic benefits that the mine 71

G F

H

7 See “Legislative Yuan accelerates strict review of mining law,” April 10, 2018, www. cet-taiwan.org (in Chinese). 8 “CEO Hsu makes fortune, the residents suffer,” June 24, 2019, www.cet-taiwan.org (in Chinese). 9 Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores, “Don’t wake up the dragon! Monstrous geontologies in a mining waste impoundment,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 6 (2018): 1063–80.

provides to the community, half of its workers are aboriginals. These economic benefits are actually limited to subsidies such as electricity coupons. As for aboriginal workers, they are mainly temporary workers hired for the hardest jobs, and very few obtain the status of regular employees. In most cases around the world, the longer a mine has been installed, the more likely it is that local residents will accept a monetary compromise.6

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The village of Sincheng, as Asia Cement further argues, suffers fewer floods than other villages in the region. Finally, the company is quick to point out that, like its competitor Taiwan Cement, most of its activity is now concentrated in China. From a classic geopolitical angle, this last argument can be seen as a factor aggravating Taiwan’s economic dependence on China. The environmentalists prefer to stress the blatant case of environmental injustice against Aborigines.

Of the 217 mining areas in Taiwan, 80% are in aboriginal territory.7 As was obvious after typhoon Morakot in 2009, while Aborigines compose only 2% of the population, their location in mountainous areas makes their communities the most exposed to risk and damage from typhoons, floods, and landslides. Sincheng’s residents took the opportunity of Asia Cement’s shareholders’ meeting in June 2019 to express their rage (see figs. H–J), with one

PAUL JOBIN

I

J

L

K

F— People standing in the shape of Taiwan during a demonstration against Asia, June 25, 2017. G— First meeting of the tripartite negotiation, Sincheng, March 25, 2018. H|J— Protest at Asia Cement’s shareholders’ meeting, Taipei, June 24, 2019. K— Demonstration in Taipei against Asia Cement on June 25, 2017. L— A sticker mocking Asia Cement’s president, June 2017. Designed by Poby Yang.

of them shouting: “Our land does not only carry cement. It also carries our culture, our offerings, our songs. All we know is related to this land. But this land is no more. You dug it away!” 8 On July 11, 2019, the Taipei High Court delivered its verdict ordering that the Ministry of Economic Affairs revoke its approval of the mine’s extended permit of operation (see fig. K). But the company stubbornly appealed the decision, as if the very head of Asia Cement’s boss

EXTRACTIVISM IN THE CRITICAL ZONE

was filled with cement (see fig. L). Despite his attempt to launch “extractivism with a human face,” his “mining geontology” definitely needs a reset.9

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Uber Eats: How Capitalism Consumes the Future Timothy Mitchell

1

WE LIVE IN AN AGE in which extraordinary wealth seems or comes at too great a social and ecological cost. Those are imto arrive from unfathomable sources. When the U.S. firm Uber portant criticisms, but there is another way to see our relation went public in 2019, the stock market set its value at $82 bil- to the future. Growth is not the logic of capitalist modernity lion, an immense figure for a ten-year-old car service com- but its alibi. In the past, we spoke of modernity in terms of physical expany that owned no cars and had never made a profit. To explain such events, the news media often turn to metaphors from pansion. Historians described capitalism as a process that bemeteorology, describing the investors’ gains as “stratospher- gan in Europe and gradually expanded to encompass the world. ic.” What other way to explain, for example, how the $5 mil- We now see this narrative as a partial account of changes that lion that Goldman Sachs had invested in Uber in 2011 was now were never isolated in one place. Changes in patterns of trade worth over half a billion dollars, a return in eight years of more and credit, the exploitation of labor and the soil, and the dethan 1,000%? More critical commentators called the firm’s value struction of populations and ways of life were always occurring on a transcontinental scale. To see this process as the spatial “exsomething conjured out of “thin air.”1 The source of such windfalls is nothing meteorological. To pansion” of the West reflected some of these aspects, but it was understand this way of making money, we need to come down a product of ways of measuring and analyzing change that obto earth. While Uber is an extreme case, its mode of acquiring scured as much as they reported. wealth is commonplace: the company created its value by conIs there a similar way to change our understanding of time? structing a practical means of consuming the future. That is, can we not just be as critical toward conceptions of hisMethods of extracting income from the future have been tory-as-growth as we are toward geography-as-expansion, but, around for a long time. The device that Uber used, the joint- as it were, also develop a similar kind of postcolonial perspecstock company, has existed in its current form for 150 years. We tive? Can we include the perspective not only of those whose have an everyday language for describing our economic rela- lands and livelihoods have been colonized, but of those whose tionship to the future, using words like “stock price,” “interest future has been taken from them? To achieve this, we need to rate,” “technology,” and “economic growth.” But none of these understand the mechanisms of extraction from the future that terms explains how the lives of those coming later will pay the have operated under the alibi of growth. bill. In fact, the language of finance blinds us to this relationValue Above All ship, persuading us that future human livelihoods are not the source of the gains but our beneficiaries. Today, in the face of the climate crisis, we need to under- WHEN A COMPANY is floated on the stock market, the shares stand how this blindness is produced. The climate emergency offered for sale represent a share in the ownership of its future requires us to act in relation to future conditions. But govern- profits. Since the revenue is not available immediately, the valments appear unable to take account of the long term, while ue of each year’s income is discounted to adjust for the delay their actions often seem powerless against the forces of glob- in time until it accrues. The present discounted value of future al capital. Even if it were possible to overcome these difficul- profits, as it is called, produces the firm’s valuation. In the case of Uber, at the time the firm went public, it had ties, the consequences seem unworkable. Capitalism, whatever its costs, claims to have given us growth. How could we survive not yet made a profit. The company had been setting the price under a different temporality, in which the future was not de- of rides below their actual cost, in order to drive competitors out of business. These subsidized operations were losing bilfined by a principle of economic expansion? For as long as we have organized collective life around lions of dollars every year. To value the firm, financial analysts the principle of economic growth, there have been ef- assumed that Uber would continue to expand until it achieved forts to point out its lim- “market dominance.” By eliminating alternatives, Uber and its Hubert Horan, “Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty: its: that growth is unsustaina- one U.S. rival, Lyft, could continue to claim a share of every Will the ‘Train Wreck’ Uber/Lyft IPOs Finally Change the Public Narrative About Ridesharing?,” naked capble, is not measured correctly, fare its drivers earned, at an average of 20%, while using their italism, May 30, 2019, https://www.nakedcapitalism. com/2019/05/hubert-horan-will-the-train-wreck-uberlyft-ipos-finally-change-the-public-narrative-aboutridesharing.html; see also Sridhar Natarajan, “Goldman Lost the Uber IPO, It Has a 12,000% Consolation Prize Instead,” Bloomberg, May 6, 2019, https://www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2019-05-06/goldman-s-12-000consolation-after-morgan-stanley-wins-uber-ipo.

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growing duopoly to limit the portion paid to drivers and increase the cost to passengers. These assumptions suggested that Uber would stop losing money six years after turning public, and within ten years would be earning annual profits of almost $5 billion.2 A joint-stock company provides not just a promise of future profits; it is a mechanism for acquiring that promised income in the present. In offering shares for sale on the stock market, the investors who own a firm are selling a form of property, the ownership today of income taken from the future. This is the process known as “capitalizing” a future revenue. The windfalls they earn from the sale come not from thin air but from the political robustness of capitalization — the method of monetizing and marketing a private claim to the future.3 The windfall represents the value of an encumbrance imposed on the firm’s future customers and workers. The company’s profits, and thus its shareholders’ dividends, depend on maintaining this burden. The value of the share, and the dividend on which it depends, takes priority over any demand from employees for fairer wages or from customers for lower prices, thanks to the greater strength of the company compared to its workers and customers — the strength indicated by the political term “market dominance.” The encumbrance is not a necessary cost of running a business but a surcharge — a rent — that the dominant position of the company allows it to impose. The $82 billion valuation of Uber represented the present value of such a power arrangement. The firm’s drivers and passengers would repay it, over time, from their pockets. The shareholder corporation is an apparatus for colonizing time. It provides a means of enriching a group of entrepreneurs and financiers in the present by imposing an additional charge on tens of millions of users in the future. The windfall acquired today by those who set up the control mechanisms and arrange the credit lines out of which the apparatus is built will be paid from the incomes of those living five, ten, or twenty years from now — in fact as far into the future as the apparatus of capture can be extended. Nothing about this is unique to Uber. The corporate method of capturing revenues emerged over the last century and a half, as the shareholder corporation became what Thorstein Veblen in 1923 called “the master institution of civilised life.”4 Besides enriching its founders, the business firm also provides a source of gain to the retail investors who purchase its shares. About a decade after Veblen, a second “master institution” emerged for realizing future revenue in the present, the mortgage bank and the housing market. Little used in the United States until federal guarantees were introduced in the mid1930s, home mortgages converted housing into another mode of capitalization. Speculative builders could now sell homes not at the cost of their material construction, but at the capitalized

value of occupying a residence over thirty years. The real estate and mortgage industries grew to rival the joint-stock corporation as apparatuses for indebting the future and capturing a promised revenue in the present. In later decades, the automobile loan, the credit card, the college education, and many other devices emerged for converting the course of human lives into repayment schedules.5 Driving Profits

THE SURPR ISING THING about our relationship to the future is that we have become so blind to the way in which we impoverish it. A century ago, it was quite clear to an economist like Veblen how this method of “sabotage,”6 as he called it, operated. Today, economists have available a different language. They transpose the method of living at the expense of those who will repay the debt into what is called “growth.” Economists make two moves to render impoverishment into growth. The first is to attribute the increasing value of a business firm not to extraction from the future but to an improvement in technology. The second is to measure both the windfall gained in the present and the charges through which it will be repaid in the future as equivalent contributions to a larger good — the growth of what we call the economy. The first move is to ascribe the gain to technology. Isn’t the high valuation of successful companies due to innovation, which produces increased efficiencies? Won’t a firm’s future employees and customers be the beneficiaries of these efficiencies and cost savings? Let us take the case of Uber 2 The discussion of Uber’s corporate valuation here is again. Its success, as Hubert Horbased on the figures provided by Aswath Domadaran, an explains, cannot be attribut“Uber’s Coming Out Party: Personal Mobility Pioneer or Car Service on Steroids?,” Musings on Markets (blog), ed to any technological breakJanuary 13, 2020, http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot. through.7 Its smartphone app com/2019/04/ubers-coming-out-party-personal.html; and Domadaran, “Lyft Off? The First Ride Sharing may have initially made the IPO!,” ibid., March 7, 2019, http://aswathdamodaran. blogspot.com/2019/03/lyft-off-first-ride-sharing-ipo. matching of riders and cars more html, where Uber’s dependence on “market domiefficient. But Uber did not innance” is laid out. vent the smartphone, the inter3 On capitalization, see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of net, the GPS, electronic payments, the Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner, 1904); Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as or any other technology used by Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York: car firms. The coordinated use Routledge, 2009); Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, Ownership Economics: On the Foundations of Interest, of such systems was spreading in Money, Markets, Business Cycles and Economic Development (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Fabian almost every area of urban life, Muniesa et al., Capitalization: A Cultural Guide (Paris: from ordering a pizza to catching Presses des Mines, 2017). a city bus. Their use in private 4 Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business transportation was soon adoptEnterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923), 86. ed by most car service companies. Uber’s expansion was based 5 See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. largely on its predatory pricing, Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012). Originally published in Italian as La fabbrica intended to force local taxi firms dell’uomo indebitato: Saggio sulla condizione neoliberista (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2012).

6 Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 205–28. 7 See Hubert Horan, “Will the Growth of Uber Increase Economic Welfare?,” Transportation Law Journal 44, no. 1 (2017): 33–105.

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out of business. Its venture capitalist investors equipped it with a fund of $13 billion, which Uber used to set the price of fares well below the cost of each ride. Initially, it was paying $1.50 in costs for every dollar it earned carrying passengers. Later it reduced the loss, but only by increasing the share it claimed from each fare and forcing down the income of its drivers. In some cases, the portion of the fare that Uber took could be 50% or more.8 Rather than being a new technology, this was the “shock of the old.” 9 As so often happens, the core of the new business was something surprisingly unoriginal — the century-old machinery of the private car. No machine was more important for building the unsustainable world of the twentieth century than the private automobile. The car made the production of petroleum into the world’s largest industry, contributing more than any other device to the growth of carbon emissions. Private cars had a parallel effect on how people lived, accounting for up to 50% of land use in cities and enabling the creation of suburbia with its energy-intensive modes of housing, land use, and privatized transportation. And the individual ownership of cars, by far the most expensive item that most households might purchase, generated the first and largest forms of corporate consumer finance. The car industry pioneered the creation of widespread personal debt, through which everyday lives became an expanding system for funding the payment of future fees and interest to banks. Instead of developing a novel technology, the new transportation firms had found a different way to earn payments from the use of private vehicles, slotting in alongside oil companies, property developers, and the financial industry. A handful of global car service corporations could now promise a future in which they would extract monopoly rents from every vehicle journey. How Economists Would Like the Economy to Look 8 See Hubert Horan, “Uber’s Path of Destruction,” American Affairs 3, no 2 (2019): 108–33. 9 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 10 See Peter Cohen et al., “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2016). 11 Stephen J. Dubner and Steve Levitt, “Why Uber Is an Economist’s Dream” (episode 258), Freakonomics Radio, podcast audio, September 7, 2016, http:// freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/. 12 See Horan, “Will the Growth of Uber Increase Economic Welfare?” 13 Municipal regulation was far from perfect but was open to local protest, political organizing, and reform in ways that a global company with near monopoly of the industry may not be. London, New York, and California have attempted to make Uber subject to labor law.

FOR DECADES, ECONO MISTS have been attributing the extraction of future rents to supposed improvements in technology. In the case of Uber, the firm employed its own economists to describe this rent extraction as a customer benefit. The company’s monopoly provided the data through which such claims could be made. In setting passenger fares and drivers’ wages, Uber benefited from exclusive control of the information gathered from

every ride taken. This enabled them to adjust charges according to an algorithm that calculated how low driver wages could be pushed, or how high passenger fares increased, to maximize profits at every moment. Known as “surge pricing,” this evasion of fare regulation and minimum wage payments was promoted as the creation of value. The proprietary data from millions of fare payments was used to construct the argument. Economists at Uber published an academic paper estimating the value of the benefit. Every dollar paid for Uber rides, they claimed, produced $1.60 in value, generating what they labeled imaginatively as a “consumer surplus” of $6.8 billion a year. This figure was the difference between the fare Uber charged and the highest fare passengers might have been willing to pay, estimated from their responses to surge pricing.10 In other words, Uber’s failure to fully deploy its surge pricing algorithm and extract the highest possible price at every instant was portrayed as a benefit to those dependent on its car services. The business press and economists’ blogs promoted these findings as evidence of the novel forms of value that Uber’s technology was creating. A prominent University of Chicago economist, who co-authored the Uber paper, described the firm as “the embodiment of what the economists would like the economy to look like.”11 Many economists work hard to make the economy embody the truth of their ideas, including the idea that a more coercive pricing method can create value. Their collaboration with Uber economists provided an example of this work. What appears as a technological breakthrough can instead be the source of new costs and inefficiencies.12 Uber and Lyft differed from local car service firms in one important way: the new companies did not own the vehicles. Requiring drivers to use their own cars made the vehicles more expensive to own and manage, as owners could not benefit from fleet discounts for buying and insuring them or from supervised maintenance programs. The companies set drivers’ wages and terms of work, but refused to classify them as employees, with rights to a minimum wage or employment benefits. Owning no cars allowed the new firms to evade the laws with which cities regulated the car service industry. Municipal regulation, however imperfect, had allowed for the screening and licensing of drivers and for rules ensuring public goods, such as the requirement to accept riders traveling to poorer neighborhoods or to accommodate those with disabilities, and for fares that assured drivers a minimum wage.13 There were wider costs to this undermining of municipal government, which offset the benefit of any possible technical improvements. Uber’s long-term goal was to destroy not only urban car service companies but also public transportation. Its subsidized rides drew passengers away from mass transit, depriving public services of income. One study found that 60% of car service users in large, dense cities “would have taken public

14 Here and the following Bruce Schaller, The New Automobility: Lyft, Uber and the Future of American Cities (New York: Schaller Consulting, 2018), 33.

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transportation, walked, biked or not made the trip”14 if the new car service companies had not been available, creating a 160% increase in driving on city streets. To build their monopoly, the new firms promoted the instant availability of vehicles, which relied on surplus drivers cruising the streets waiting for rides, clogging roadways with cars at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists and increasing air pollution. The report summed up the impact as “more traffic, less transit, and less equity and environmental sustainability.” The future profits of the new companies were to come not from technical efficiencies or improvements in collective welfare but from the opportunities for building monopoly power. Uber planned to expand its monopoly into general transportation services, launching a food delivery service called Uber Eats. But expansion offered no technical innovation and no means of turning a loss-making company into a machine of future profits, other than enlarging the firm’s monopoly power to extract a rent payment from future drivers and customers. What Uber eats is the future. Growth

WHAT ABOUT the second move, describing our relationship to the future as growth? The capture of future revenue in the present reflects the expectation of later profits. As business grows, it will create “economic growth.” The income may come from the future, but it is a future that will surely be larger and more prosperous. The windfall in the present is a reward, this view explains, for the entrepreneurs who engineer growth and create greater prosperity for all. Like technical improvement, economic growth is an alibi, a mode in which our relationship to the future is misrecognized. We can distinguish two aspects of the alibi: the growth of the individual business firm, and what appears as the growth of human society as a whole. We have come to reckon the second in terms of the first, measuring the human collective as if it were a collection of business firms. The name we give this multi-firm is “the economy.” The first aspect is the individual firm and its investors. The original entrepreneurs sell shares to other investors, who acquire ownership of the company’s future revenue. They are unlikely to enjoy the windfall gained by the founding investors, but they are compensated by acquiring the future rents at a discount. The discount is calculated by considering what the investors might have earned by purchasing shares in another business. By convention, the value of that foregone earning is assumed to be the amount that banks would charge for extending credit to a firm — the rate of interest. The concept of “interest” is a modern way of describing the so-called time value of money,

UBER EATS

a value that we now take to be a natural property of money. It is better understood as a product of arrangements, such as the joint-stock company, that reliably postpone income into the future. Without such mechanisms of reliable postponement there would be no time value of money. Arguably, there would be virtually no money. To illustrate briefly how discounting works, suppose the discount (or interest) rate is reckoned at 10%. Because the share will earn its income in the future, the cost of purchasing the postponed income is discounted by 10% a year. So the investor buys a dollar of the amount available in one year’s time for about 90 cents, a dollar available in two years for 83 cents, and so on up to year ten, for which each dollar would be discounted to about 39 cents. In other words, the investor purchases each dollar of future income at a price that drops from 90 cents down to less than 40 cents. This method of devaluing and purchasing a future revenue is usually described in reverse. The ordinary investor understands it not as the purchase of money at a discounted price, but as an “investment” in the present that somehow “grows” in value over time. The term “growth” suggests some kind of material expansion. But nothing is required to increase in physical size or complexity for such growth to occur. If anything, it requires something to shrink: the future revenue is acquired at a fraction of its value. This shrinkage is produced by organizing the power of postponement. Money does not possess this ability to purchase future income at a discount by nature. The ability is derived from the fact that time can be controlled — by the construction of an apparatus that will reliably capture and colonize the future. We have come to inhabit a world governed more and more by such arrangements. We diminish the value of the future by developing mechanisms to acquire it cheaply in the present, and then experience the path to that future as “growth.” Another aspect of this growth is that it is seen not just as a feature of individual business firms but as the collective trajectory of society. To manage the control of time, a larger frame has been constructed that helps stabilize the sometimes unsteady temporality of the business firm. Invented only in the mid-twentieth century, this supporting armature is called “the economy.” We usually think of the economy in spatial terms, as the sum of all transactions within a given geographical territory. But the economy is also a kind of time machine, a way of organizing our relationship to the future. Like the value of a business firm, its nature is to appear to “grow” — to expand year-onyear. As with the firm, such growth hides the fact that more and more future income has been acquired at a discount. Its subsequent repayment, at full price, turns a mode of consuming the future into what appears as an increase in size. When households purchase and consume material goods, this consumption is measured as part of the economy. But when

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they pay the encumbrances imposed by monopolistic firms, the interest payments charged by banks and mortgage companies, the debts incurred for education and healthcare, and every other charge and fee imposed for increasingly privatized and monopolized services, those escalating payments all count toward the measurement of “growth.” In fact, in the United States and many other countries, almost all so-called growth is now accounted for by payments of this kind.15 We live in a world organized to place the future in debt, with the income discounted to the creditor and later repaid in full by those encumbered or indebted. The difference between the initial discount and the subsequent full repayment is measured as a growth in the economy, and mistaken for an improvement in collective well-being. MANY ACCOUNTS of the climate crisis blame our predicament on the phenomenon of growth. They point out, correctly, the inadequacy of most efforts to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and other actions destructive of the biosphere. But we often attribute these failures to a general relationship to the future that we identify, misleadingly, as the very logic of our history.

Growth appears to us as the unfolding of a human trajectory through time, driven by the forces of modernization. We use terms like “capitalism” and “globalization” to name the power of what propels us forward. These terms can make the idea of growth something natural and inevitable. They also make it difficult to see beyond. Escaping the problem of growth seems to require reversing the very movement of history. There is no denying that some processes have unfolded at accelerating rates, such as the extraction of coal and oil. But we also know that other things decrease, such as the extent of rainforests or the amount of most people’s leisure time. Perhaps it is time to use a word like “growth” in more limited ways, to capture some changes and not others, and therefore not as a general term for our relationship to the future. In doing so, we would discover that the most widespread use of the idea of growth in contemporary politics, derived from finance and economics, denotes not the collective movement of society but the obscure conventions of business accounting. Those conventions describe a mode of living at the expense of the future. They blind us to the way that future is diminished.

15 Michael Hudson and Dirk Bezemer, “Incorporating the Rentier Sectors into a Financial Model,” World Economic Review, vol. 1 (2012): 1–12.

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Domesticating Soil in Earth’s Critical Zone

1

Steve Banwart

Wild Horse in a Perfect Storm

AT THE HEART of Earth’s Critical Zone there is soil, a porous living layer that bridges rock and sky; a vital connecting force upon which human life utterly depends. The Anthropocene lift off, described in the introduction to this volume, creates enormous pressure on soil, primarily due to the ever-intensifying demands of human land use. In 2010, John Beddington and colleagues 3 described the effect of this lift off as a perfect storm of converging demands on natural resources, due to increase in human population and wealth. In the 40 years from 2010 to 2050, human population was previously predicted to grow to 9.3 billion people with a quadrupling in the global economy, a doubling in demand for food and fuel, and a more than 50 percent increase in demand for clean water. These demands must be met while mitigating and adapting to climate change and the effects of global biodiversity decline.4 The storm is a stiff test for humanity. In the period between 2010 and the publication of this volume, the direction of travel has not been great. Human population is now expected to approach 9.8 billion by 2050. Greenhouse gas levels for nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4,), which are more potent than CO2 in driving climate change, have exceeded previous levels observed during modern atmospheric record-keeping. Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than in previous years and now exceed 400 parts per million (ppm). To many people involved in action to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change, this increase in CO2 levels above the preindustrial level of 280 ppm is a psychologically important milestone of failure, at least so far, to prevent potentially catastrophic changes to Earth’s climate. Not only are humans asking much more from the Critical Zone and its soil, the capacity to feed people is being compromised by these demands. In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agricultural yields were projected to decrease overall during this century.5 This is due to expected changes in future weather patterns causing more arid conditions and insufficient water in many major grain-producing regions around the world. Using current trends in agricultural productivity, the United Nations Environment Programme also projects that the productive land required to meet the demand for food in 2050 will have to expand massively. This increase is calculated to be at least 380 million

hectares worldwide, potentially as much as 850 million hectares, a range that is estimated to be 10–45% greater than Earth’s environmental capacity.6 The Storm Is Growing in Intensity

SOME OF THE most devastating effects on soil are from agricultural practices that have intensified cultivation with the beneficial intent to produce greater yields. Often, these practices did not recognize the negative impacts on the longevity of soil and its fertility. One of the most severe threats is desertification, which occurs when significant loss of soil carbon as organic matter, and its capacity to supply water and nutrients to plants, is unable to sufficiently support vegetation cover. This loss of soil carbon is especially severe during land use transitions when forest or permanent grassland is converted to arable cultivation for intensive agriculture. Further threats to soil are the sealing over of soil by urbanization and the loss of soil fertility. The ability of soil to support plant growth can become compromised due to physical loss of soil by erosion to water courses, salinization, which is the accumulation of mineral salts that are deposited when percolating irrigation water evaporates, compaction that is caused by the hooves of grazing animals or heavy farm machinery and prevents water infiltration and root penetration, and toxic industrial chemical pollution that reduces biological activity. The ability of soil to help feed humans is being degraded by intensive land use, just at the time we need more agricultural production than ever before. 1 The scientific literature that underpins much of the Perhaps soil is the Earth's wild content in this contribution is collated within a recent critical review article from which further detailed inhorse described in the introducformation on Earth’s Critical Zone and soil functions tion to this volume, in the perfect can be obtained. See Steven A. Banwart et al., “Soil Functions: Connecting Earth’s Critical Zone,” Annual storm kicking back at humans Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 47 (2019): because of the beating we give it; 333–59. trying to drive soil faster, hard2 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac [1949] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 132. er, and to do more for us. If soil is a wild being, it may be a better 3 See H. Charles J. Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People,” Science 327, strategy for us to build trust with no. 5967 (2010): 812–8. it, domesticate it, and work with 4 See Steven A. Banwart et al., “Soil Functions.” soil to create a partnership from 5 See Rajendra K. Pachauri, Leo Meyer, and The Core which both humans and soil ben Writing Team, eds., Climate Change 2014: Synthesis enefit. Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2015). 6 See International Resource Panel and Working Group on Land and Soils, eds., Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption with Sustainable Supply (United Nations Environmental Program and International Resource Panel, 2014).

CRITICAL ZONES — TITLE HERE

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The Birth of Soil

SOIL FOR MS FROM geological parent material; rock that is either pushed up to Earth’s surface by tectonic forces, or that is deposited after being transported from another location on Earth’s surface (see fig. 1). The movement of rock can occur, for example, by glacier advance that dislodges and pushes rock along the path of the ice, erosion, and landslip from the face of mountainsides to valley floors, or river transport of sediment from eroding hills to lowland or coastal areas. This freshly exposed or deposited rock begins to weather, to react chemically with the carbonic acid that forms when atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves into the infiltrating surface water. Even the hardest, most solid rock has fractures, formed by the flexing of the brittle rock mass as Earth’s surface is lifted up by tectonic forces and lowered by erosion. The fractures, sometimes only narrow cracks of perhaps a millimeter in width, allow water to infiltrate into the underlying rock mass. At the face of the fractures, the minerals that make up rock slowly react with seeping water and dissolve, sometimes only a few atomic layers in a year. As the primary minerals of the parent rock dissolve over thousands and millions of years, other secondary minerals are formed. These minerals often have a lower volume than

parent material and this creates porosity, which slowly develops from the fracture faces inward within the rock mass. Secondary minerals include clays and iron- and aluminum-oxide particles that are less than a micron in size, a similar size to many types of bacteria, and are important microscopic building blocks of soil. Another essential contribution to soil is living and dead organic matter. This develops as mineral nutrients are dissolved from solid rock, helping nourish the growth of photosynthetic organisms at the interface where rock meets sky. A common feature of photosynthetic organisms in this surface environment is their symbiotic relationship with bacteria and fungi that help release nutrients from the rock. Almost all land plants depend on a close symbiotic relationship with soil fungi that are attached to the plant roots, where the fungi draw on carbon and energy from the photosynthesis process of the vegetation. This allows the fungi to grow prolifically into the surrounding rock pores and accelerate the biological extraction of mineral nutrients such as potassium that is passed through the living network of fungal mass back to the plant root, which nourishes plants and enables them to grow and thrive. Establishing vegetation also releases soluble organic compounds from the plant roots and attached mesh of growing fungi. Some of the molecules that are released are highly reactive

Fig. 1: Soil is formed from bedrock as planetary tectonic forces thrust up the rock into contact with air, infiltrating water and plants. These agents act in concert to break down rock and form the loose, porous layer of soil that supports plant growth and provides many benefits to people including food production.

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with minerals and dissolve them much more quickly than water and inorganic acids alone. These organic compounds and the dead biomass of roots and fungi provide a rich source of fresh carbon and energy to support groups of soil microbes that decompose the organic matter and recycle the nutrient contents of the biomass back to soil. Microbial decomposer organisms are the base of the soil food web. Their establishment as a force for recycling organic matter, produced when photosynthetic organisms colonize the surface rock layers, can be considered the stage of parent material weathering at which the rock mass begins to behave like soil; the stage where soil is born. The Life of Soil

SOIL HAS A LIFE CYCLE; a dynamic relationship between plants as primary producers of biomass and the soil microbial decomposer community that breaks down dead organic matter and releases the nutrient chemical elements for new plant growth. An important characteristic that changes along the life cycle is that of soil structure, the physical distribution and connection of pore space and solid particles (see fig. 2). The mineral and organic solid building blocks of soil are the fragments of parent rock material, secondary minerals that form during weathering, living organisms that colonize the soil pores, and decaying biomass. As organic matter decomposes in the soil layer, the particles clump together to form soil aggregates, the fundamental units of soil life (see fig. 3). Aggregate formation coincides with a number of soil actions that are essential to human life. The actions of soil include • supporting plant growth through provision of nutrients, • storage and supply of plant available water within aggregates and fine pores , • transmission of infiltrating water through connected large pores, • vertical flow of infiltration to feed groundwater recharge and stream discharge, • filtration of pollutants from percolating water by their sorption onto pore walls, • destruction of pollutants through their decomposition by soil microorganisms, • storage of C and N in organic matter rather than emission as greenhouse gases, • habitat for microbes that are a reservoir of enormous genetic biodiversity, • a repository to store and protect geological and archaeological heritage, • a geological vault and biological reactor to receive and process waste, and • a physical platform for landscapes and built structures.

THE STARTING POINT of these actions is the addition of plant litter as dead biomass to soil. Soil fauna, for example, insects, earthworms, and mites, chew and digest these leaf, stem, and root fragments into smaller particles that are deposited in the soil. The fresh plant material offers competitive advantage to soil decomposer microbes that can support cell growth by colonizing and decomposing the organic particles. The surfaces of the plant fragments support thriving microbial biofilms that produce organic polymers, which are deposited outside of the cells. The polymers act as adhesive compounds for parent material fragments and secondary clays and oxides to bind to the decomposing plant material and form larger macroaggregates, which can grow to several millimeters in size. Smaller pores within macroaggregates hold water to support plant growth while larger pores between aggregates allow drainage of infiltrating water. This amazing network of sponges and drains helps soil support plants in both extremes of flood and drought. Oxidation and decomposition of organic matter is usually fastest when carried out by microbes that use oxygen (O2) from air for their metabolism, creating soil respiration that

Fig. 2: Soil is the porous interface between sky, plants, and rock that transmits and transforms flows of material, energy and organisms that enter and leave the soil layer. Humans are critically dependent on the life-sustaining resources that are provided by this amazing bioreactor at Earth’s surface, which is the heart of the Critical Zone, and connects the above- and below-ground worlds.

DOMESTICATING SOIL IN EARTH’S CRITICAL ZONE

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Fig. 3: Soil aggregates are the fundamental biophysical units that support soil functions; providing a range of environments that both store and drain water for plants, support microorganisms that require spaces with O2 (oxic) to live and others that require spaces without O2 (anoxic) to live, and collectively help decompose organic matter and build macroaggregates while recycling nutrients back to living plants.

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releases CO2 back to the atmosphere. During biomass decomposition, the nutrients of the biomass (elements C, N, P, K) are released to the soil pore waters and become available to support plant growth. For this reason, adding fresh organic matter as compost to soil provides organic fertilizer that accelerates vegetation growth as the compost decomposes. Decomposition can have a downside, too, particularly emissions of potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. This occurs because O2 molecules diffuse 100,000 times slower in water than in air. As oxygen is used up by decomposition of organic matter in the center of aggregates, the water-filled micropores of the aggregate do not allow sufficient O2 diffusion from the outer surface, and the interior of the aggregates come oxygen-free. Under these conditions, other microbes that do not need O2 for respiration continue to break down the plant biomass but in the process can release methane and nitrous oxide rather than CO2 back to the atmosphere. Aggregates also help to store organic carbon by slowing its decomposition in the low-O2 interior. Decomposing organSee Steven A. Banwart et al., “The Global Challenge for Soil Carbon,” in Soil Carbon: Science, Management and ic matter can also bind to the Policy for Multiple Benefits, ed. Steven A. Banwart, Eleanor Milne, and Elke Noellemeyer (Wallingford: CABI, 2014), 1–9.

mineral surfaces in aggregates, and as this happens, the bound organic matter becomes less bioavailable for microbial respiration and decomposition can be slowed or stopped. This carbon storage effect allows macroaggregates to persist, to store organic carbon against decomposition, and reduce the release of CO2 to the atmosphere. This action of aggregates allows carbon to persist in soil for millennia, and that carbon no longer is available to contribute to soil greenhouse gas emissions as CO2. By protecting organic matter from rapid decomposition, the amount of organic carbon that has accumulated in Earth’s Critical Zone is about three times greater than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.7 If photosynthesis adds organic matter to soil at a faster rate than soil respiration produces CO2, then soil can help remove CO2 as a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Human action being considered to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide includes helping crops and forests to add carbon more efficiently to soil for long-term storage.8 Current work on farming and forestry seeks methods to manage soil that allow enough organic matter decomposition to release nutrients for plant growth and still protect residual organic matter in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the land surface (see figs. 4 a–d).

8 See Meine van Noordwijk et al., “Soil Carbon Transition Curves: Reversal of Land Degradation through Management of Soil Organic Matter for Multiple Benefits,” in Soil Carbon, 26–46.

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There are additional benefits to forming soil macroaggregates. They are thriving bioreactors and the microbial activity that decomposes plant material can also break down organic pollutants such as pesticides. Inorganic pollutants including metal ions like cadmium and arsenic cannot be decomposed, but they can be immobilized by chemically binding to the mineral particles and the organic matter in the aggregates. Such sorption reactions make the pollutants that enter soil less mobile for transport to water courses and less bioavailable for plant uptake. Reduced transport and bioavailability protects food crops and water from pollution and reduces the risk of toxic exposure to organisms, including humans. Productive soils that are useful to humans require a continuous input of fresh organic matter to build and maintain soil aggregates. Loss of organic matter prevents formation of new aggregates and causes existing aggregates to break up because the decomposed organic matter becomes unable to provide sufficient carbon and energy to maintain the active microbial populations. The relationship of humans with soil is often about managing organic matter inputs to create, protect, and enhance the aggregates that support soil actions. Enhancing soil requires

management of vegetation and composting, or reducing practices such as mechanical tillage and overgrazing that break up aggregates and reduce organic matter content. Many parts of the world are learning how to manage soil organic matter to better support soil actions. These efforts include managing soil to help prevent climate change, and to help protect food production against potential future changes in climate. Thinking like a Mountain

MOUNTAINS AR E the parents of soil, a source of rock from which soil forms. If we act on the words of Aldo Leopold and think like a mountain, we see soil as a living being with which to build a relationship. If we treat soil well and gain its trust, humans and soil can domesticate each other and build a productive partnership to weather the perfect storm. Humans need soil to act well if we are to reach 2050 and still feed the world, provide clean water, support global biodiversity, and prevent harmful effects of climate change. If we continue to treat soil badly, it will continue to react badly, to pull back and kick, a difficult action for humans to manage while navigating a raging storm.

Figs. 4 a–d: Soil organic matter that helps to build aggregates (a) and support soil functions can build up in many different ways, by growing new plants and ecosystems on bare rock as glaciers retreat (b), by harnessing the photosynthetic power of forests to build biomass and soil organic matter below ground (c) and by farming practices such as terracing to prevent erosion (d).

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Uranium City Series on Abandonment, Two Field Trips Robert Boschman THE FOLLOWING IMAGES represent scenes as found in Uranium City, Saskatchewan, Canada, an abandoned uranium extraction community on the north shore of Lake Athabasca, during two field trips in May 2017 and May 2018. Nothing was moved, touched, arranged, lit, or otherwise changed while taking these photographs. Uranium City was abandoned in 1982, when Eldorado Mining Company, a Canadian Crown Corporation, closed all of its mines and mills at once. Approximately four to five thousand inhabitants left in the aftermath, abandoning their homes, schools, churches, hospital, infrastructure, and their dead. One former mine, Beaverlodge, was remediated immediately, the first effort of its kind in Canada. Over thirty other mine and mill sites were left. The Lorado Mine site was finally remediated in 2016; Gunnar is being remediated now at a cost of $100,000,000 CAD (approx. $75,192,700 USD). Fifty people still live in what remains of the city in 2019. The area will be monitored by the government and scientists indefinitely.

Field Trip #1: May 2017, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Abandoned Car, Early Spring, 2017. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 35mm Tamron fixed lens.

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Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Wasp Nests, Dishwasher Racks, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 85mm Tamron fixed lens.

Field Trip #1: May 2017, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Oikos Collapse, 2017. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 24mm Nikon fixed lens.

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Field Trip #1: May 2017, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Lichens Carpet the Unraked Forest, Uranium City, 2017. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 24mm Nikon fixed lens.

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Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Inside, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D810, 35mm Tamron fixed lens. I wish to acknowledge Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati for introducing the idea that everything is inside. I was thinking of this re-conception when I pressed the shutter button here.

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Field Trip #1: May 2017, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Remediation Burial 1982, Beaverlodge Mine and Mill, 2017. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 35mm Tamron fixed lens.

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Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, The Closing Scene Opens, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D810, 35mm Tamron fixed lens.

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Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Hieroglyphs of the Moderns, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D810, 35mm Tamron fixed lens.

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Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Crash Landing, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D810, 24mm Nikon fixed lens.

Field Trip #2: May 2018, Uranium City, Saskatchewan Robert Boschman, Poplar Return, 2018. Digital photograph, Nikon D610, 24mm Nikon fixed lens.

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What on Earth Does Climate Have to Do with Law and Liberty? Revisiting Montesquieu’s Theory of Climate Gerard de Vries NOW THAT THE NOTION of the Anthropocene has revolutionized our understanding of the relations between human activities and the Earth, the old idea that key characteristics of a society — and hence its people — are in some way determined by its climate can no longer be considered reactionary and pushed aside, Bruno Latour has argued.1 He urges us to reinvent politics, to orient politics towards the terrestrial. So, what’s the plan? I.

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FIRST, WHAT ’S THE PROBLEM? It cannot be the claim that that human activities are at once informed and constrained by the physical environment. As social life doesn’t evolve in a vacuum, it is a truism. The illustrious thinkers of the past who — from Aristotle onwards — addressed the relation of climate and people had to rely on anecdotal evidence from often unreliable sources. By now, we’re better equipped. A rigorous quantitative approach for studying the social and economic impacts of climate developed in the last decade has allowed scientists to draw substantiated conclusions. By combining data from the climate, social and statistical sciences, they have uncovered notable, quantifiable effects of climate — in particular temperature — on health, agriculture, economics, conflict, migration, and demographics. Although climate is clearly not the only factor that affects social and economic outcomes, the research confirms that it is a major factor, often with first order consequences.2 Understanding the effects of climatic conditions may help governments to respond better to the climate crisis. The illustrious thinkers of the past had a different message, however. They didn’t view climate as an external factor, the impact of which on social life and the economy may become a concern for governments. Rather, they suggested See Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New an intrinsic connection between Climatic Regime, trans. Cathy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). Originally published in French as Où a nation’s geoclimatic situation, atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique (Paris: La the physiological and mental Découverte, 2017). characteristics of its people, and See Tamma A. Carleton and Solomon M. Hsiang, “Social and economic impacts of climate,” Science 353, its political regime. Thus, Aris6304 (2016): 1112, https://doi.org/10.1126/science. totle wrote: “Those who live in aad9837. a cold climate and in Europe are Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, full of spirit, but wanting in invol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 7.7, 1327b22–8. telligence and skill; and therefore Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicathey retain comparative freedom, go: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177f.

5 See Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), subsequently – as usual in this case – cited by book (in Roman numerals) and chapter. De l’esprit des lois was originally published in 1748 in Geneva.

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but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if they could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world.”3 These are quite unpalatable lines indeed. So, here’s a problem. When in the past questions about the relation between climate and people were raised, racism was seldom far away. Theories of social evolution that grew out of the climate theories of old were used until far into the twentieth century to justify colonial rule as responsible paternalism towards peoples supposed to be unfit for democracy. That line of reasoning is no longer deemed acceptable. While granting that climate and geologic conditions may have notable effects on demography, people’s health, and economic productivity, when it comes to politics, we pull up short. That the economies of Arab states thrive on their oil resources is a truism; that the desert conditions on the Arabian Peninsula explain the persistence of their autocratic regimes is reactionary nonsense. At some point, a line is drawn between human practices and characteristics open to environmental deterministic explanations and those that are not. To cross that line means to deny a people the competences for democracy — like reason, free will, or what Hannah Arendt has called “action,” the faculty of beginning, of taking an initiative, of starting “something new which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before” 4 — like establishing a republic where autocrats ruled before. Aristotle may be excused. That Montesquieu, an enlightened mind who famously argued in The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748)5 that the best way to secure liberty is to divide power among different branches of government, reportedly has expressed similar opinions, is more disturbing. In a paper presented as a contribution to the sociology of social science, Pierre Bourdieu analyzed why and where Montesquieu went off the rails in his wide-ranging, comparative study of different kinds of government, their laws, climate and terrain, peoples’ ways of life, their wealth, number, commerce, religion, and their morals and manners.

Fig.1: Dassier Jacques-Antoine, Charles Montesquieu, around 1728. Oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm.

“Montesquieu intended to found a science of historical facts capable of understanding ‘the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things,’” 6 Bourdieu writes. It is revealed by the rhetorical features Montesquieu borrowed from physics, the most advanced science of his time, to give his thoughts coherence and credibility. However, Bourdieu argues, there is another, hidden, principle of coherence operating as well, namely a mythical one. “Without entering into a long analysis, one can restore, in the form of a simple schema, the network of oppositions and mythical equivalents, the true fantastical structure that supports [Montesquieu’s] whole ‘theory.’” Comprising hundreds of pages, The Spirit of the Laws is divided into 31 books, each of which contains several chapters. Quoting mainly from books XIV–XVII in which Montesquieu discussed the role of climate, Bourdieu discerned a basic divide between the “cold North” and the “warm South.” The North is characterized with terms and associations like “strong,” “self-conscience = courage = frankness,” “manly,” “virility,” “monogamy,” “liberty = monarchies and republics,” and “Christianity”; the South with “weakness = discouragement = (desire for revenge = suspicions, ruses, crimes) = cowardice,” “despondency,” “passivity,” “polygamy,” “servitude and despotism,” and “Mohammedanism.” The underlying opposition is one between being “master (of oneself, hence of others)” and “slave (to one’s senses, and to masters),” Bourdieu concludes. While squinting at physics, the most prestigious science of his time, Montesquieu has only reproduced the myths and prejudices of his

time. His theory of climate is the product of “a combination of social fantasies and sexual fantasies configured by society,” a paradigmatic case of how “social science, still in its infancy, hesitates between myth and science.” 7 It is a reassuring analysis. By condemning a predecessor’s work to the infancy of a science, one presents oneself as an adult who knows better. So, while we may be grateful to Montesquieu for having articulated the principle of the separation of powers, we had better leave his theory of climate for what it is: mythology, based on fairy tales. Our peace of mind leaves one question unanswered, however. Now that modern science has shown many domains of human affairs to be influenced by climatic factors, why are we convinced that ideology and myths must be at stake when explanations in terms of climate, terrain, and other environmental factors are offered for some other domains, especially the politically sensitive ones? Why do we exempt politics from being subject to physical influences? So, here’s another, deeper, problem. Apart from the racist content of the old theories, we have to question modern convictions about the nature of politics. What makes politics a special domain? Before reinventing politics, perhaps we should first examine the established understanding of it. Assumptions that shape our view of the world are seldom accessible by direct criticism. We recognize their effects only when we encounter a totally different view. Prejudices are found through contrasts, not by inspection. For that purpose, we may revisit Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. What on earth made him think that climate has anything to do with a system of law that affords liberty? By reviewing his work, we might learn something about ourselves. II.

MONTESQUIEU’S THOUGHTS about climate evolved over twenty years.8 They first appear in 1729, when he reports having discussed the unwholesome nature of the air of Rome with the French Minister to the Holy See.9 In the years that follow he reads whatever he can find on the role of climate and ter6 Here and the following Pierre Bourdieu, “Le Nord et rain in ancient literature, travle Midi: Contribution à une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales el reports, and medical works. 35 (1980): 21–5, here 22. Translated from the French. He even pursues his research7 Ibid., 24. Translated from the French. es by experimenting on a sheep’s 8 See Robert Shackleton, “The Evolution of Montongue with the aim of discovertesquieu’s Theory of Climate,” Revue Internationale de ing the reactions of what he takes Philosophie 9, no. 33/34 (1955): 317–29; Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford for the organs of taste to changUniversity Press, 1961) see especially chap. 14; Cathes in temperature. The outcome erine Volpilhac-Auger, “Genèse de L’Esprit des lois,” in Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, vol. 3, De l’esprit led him to conclude that sensibildes lois Manuscrits I, ed. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), lxxix–cxxiv; Volpilities are affected by temperature. hac-Auger, “Sur quelques sources prétendues du livre XIV de L’Esprit des lois,” in Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, vol. 4, De l’esprit des lois Manuscrits II, ed. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), Annexe B.3, 902–20.

9 Shackleton, “The Evolution of Montesquieu’s Theory of Climate," 319.

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Fig. 2: Carte pour l’Intelligence, supplement to Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois [originally: Loix] (Geneva: Barillot & Fils, 2nd. ed. 1749).

Gradually, the scope of his interests widens. Apart from the role of climate and terrain, he studies the varieties of morals, manners, religions, laws and commerce in ancient Greece and Rome, various European countries, Islamic states, and the Far East. In “Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères,” [Essay on the causes that can affect the minds and the characters] an undated working paper composed probably between 1734 and 1738, he summarizes his thoughts up to that point in time: “For every nation there is a general character, which affects every member, more or less. This is produced in two ways: by physical causes, which derive from the climate … and by moral causes, which are a combination of laws, of religion, of morals, and manners, and that certain emanation of thought, of the atmosphere and the foolishness of the Court and the Capital, which spreads itself far and wide.” 10 In 1739, Montesquieu starts working on what eventually will be published as The Spirit of the Laws. In a letter of February 1742, he reports that “eighteen books are almost completed, and six roughly prepared.” 11 The almost completed ones include books XIV, XV, and XVII that discuss climate. Book XIV contains material lifted out of the “Essai sur les causes.” In the years that follow, Montesquieu writes, rewrites, and rearranges books and chapters. For example, what initially was conceived as the first book, will in due course become book III. What would eventually become book I is written in 1742–43. Titled “On laws in general,” its style differs from all subsequent books. In systematic philosophical, rather than empirical terms, it sets the stage for what follows. It opens with the following lines: “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things; and in this sense, all beings have their laws: the divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to man [i.e., angels] have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws” (I, 1). By speaking univocally about God’s laws, laws of nature, and man’s laws, the opening statements stage a world in which the laws of physics, moral rules, and (national) laws will be treated on a par; namely, as being necessary relations. The paragraphs which follow make it clear that for his concept of law Montesquieu takes his lead from natural philosophy, the physics of his time, which had started to describe the physical world in terms of laws that state relations between moving bodies. However, contrary to what Bourdieu suggests (who misquotes the phrase “necessary relations deriving from the nature of things” (I, 1) by taking them to refer to facts, rather than laws), Montesquieu does not understand physical laws epistemologically, that is, as stating known relations between given entities. Instead, he employs natural philosophy’s concept of law to introduce a relationist ontology. Observing that “the [physical] world, formed by the motion of matter and devoid of intelligence, still continues to exist,” he

argues that “its motions must have invariable laws; and [that] if one could imagine another world than this, it would have consistent rules or it would be destroyed” (I, 1). Without its laws, that is, without its necessary relations, the natural world would not continue to exist; everything would fall apart. Common sense suggests that the world is made up of given entities which have the power to enter into relations with each other. Montesquieu’s ontology inverts the order. It claims that to sustain, to maintain itself and to continue existence, any existent has to be related to other existents. Its relations make it what it is. Without being related, no being would last a minute; it would simply not exist. The introduction of the relationist ontology in 1742–43 marks the start of what may truly be called a new style of political reasoning. The language changes. While the “Essai sur les causes” discussed the physical and moral causes of the character of a nation, The Spirit of the Laws focuses on governments, whose laws should relate to climate, terrain and a wide range of social aspects of people’s life. As a consequence, when Montesquieu lifts passages out of the “Essai sur les causes” to insert them in book XIV of The Spirit of the Laws, their role and meaning change. What originally were presented as empirical observations and generalizations, become aspects legislators need to attend to for the sake of the continuity of a government’s existence. To understand this shift fully, we’ll have to follow Montesquieu’s reasoning, informed by his relationist ontology. III.

FROM AR ISTOTLE onwards, mainstream political thought has defined the various kinds of governments by distinguishing who has sovereign power: a despot, the monarch, or the people. In contrast, Montesquieu puts the spotlight on the way power is exercised. In despotism, “one alone, without law and without rule draws everything along by his will and caprices”; in a monarchy, “one alone governs according to fixed or established laws,” which “necessarily assume mediate channels through which power flows” (II, 1; 4); for a republic, laws establishing the right to vote, and hence to exercise power, are fundamental (see II, 2). In Montesquieu’s political theory the nature of a government (“that which makes it what it is” (III, 1)) is determined by the relations between those who rule and those who are ruled, relations which in monarchies and republics are shaped by laws which mediate the exercise of power, and in despotism by their absence. However, it is not sufficient for a government to be formed and established. To continue its existence, a government should be able to act and maintain itself. Observing that man is a limited creature who falls subject to a thousand passions, ignorance and error, Montesquieu argues that human laws apply with a

10 Montesquieu, “Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères,” in Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes II. (Paris: NRF Gallimard (Pléiade), 1951), 39–68. 11 Quoted in Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography, 239.

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lesser degree of necessity than the laws of nature. Consequently, for a government to be able to act and maintain itself something else is needed, apart from its constitutional laws. Montesquieu suggests that a specific kind of passion, which he calls a government’s principle, provides the missing link. For each kind of government, he identifies its principle. He argues that without the nobles pursuing “honor,” a monarchy will fall apart; that a republic will be corrupted if its people lose “virtue,” that is, their love of democracy, of equality, and the preference of the public’s interest over one’s own; and that a despot is lost when the people no longer “fear” his ever-raised arm. As, with the exception of fear, the appropriate passions will not emerge naturally, education and proper civil and criminal laws need to be introduced to incite and support them (see IV–VIII). Laws and mediate channels for exercising power bring reflection into the business of government. Hence, both monarchies and republics provide moderate government. In both, before power is executed, a ruler’s decision will be reviewed and if found unlawful amended or nulled. To establish liberty, Montesquieu famously argued, will require, additionally, the separation of the powers of the different branches of government, the legislature, executive, and judiciary (see XI). Montesquieu defined everything in relationist terms: the physical environment is made up by relations, the social environment ditto, and so is government. He even conceived liberty, political freedom, in relationist terms. One should not confuse the power of people with their liberty, he wrote. Freedom, liberty, does not consist in doing what one wants. “Liberty is the right to do everything the law permits; and if one citizen could do what they forbid, he would no longer have liberty because the others would likewise have the same power” (XI, 3). Liberty should not be confused with what other philosophers call man’s “free will”; liberty is a consequence of living in a state where power is exercised according to laws. Up to this point, the key concepts of Montesquieu’s political theory have been argued in fairly abstract, relationist terms. But governments do not fall out of the sky, nor do they exercise power in vacuum. They govern people who share a region’s geographical and climatic conditions and who are already related to each other by their way of life, their trade, customs, religion, and their morals and manners. To establish a government means instituting new relations in addition to the ones that are already present; namely, relations between a ruler and those who are ruled. As governments have to exercise their power in the world, their laws have to relate to the world, that is, to the mundane aspects of the society they govern. How the laws should relate to a wide range of both physical and social aspects Montesquieu discussed with reference to many countries in empirical terms at great length; almost half of The Spirit of the Laws is devoted to it.

The relation of law to the nature of the climate is taken up in book XIV. Its general idea is set out in the one and only sentence of its first chapter: “If it is true that the character of the spirit and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws should be relative to the differences in these passions and to the differences in these characters” (XIV, 1). The cautious “if it is true” is dropped in the next chapter, where Montesquieu discusses “how much men differ in various climates” (XIV, 2). Here we encounter the material he has lifted out of his “Essai sur les causes,” like the results of his experiment with a sheep’s tongue. That sensibilities are indeed affected by temperature, he reports to be able to confirm by personal experiences: “I have seen operas in England and Italy; they are the same plays with the same actors: but the same music produces such different effects in the people of the two nations that it seems inconceivable, the one so calm and the other so transported” (XIV, 2). It shows, he argues, in many other aspects as well: in fashion, in people’s attitudes, in their industriousness, sobriety, and diseases, in the relation between genders, morality, and in the presence or absence of servitude. Book XIV and the following (up to XVII) contain the passages that elicited the scorn of Bourdieu. Citing the works of ancient authors, unreliable travel reports, ad hoc personal observations, and sometimes even hearsay, Montesquieu argues that physical aspects, like climate, affect people’s spirits, their activities (or lack thereof ) and their mutual relations. Little of it will stand up against what is known today; much reflects the prejudices of former times. Indeed, what would one expect? But Bourdieu has missed the mark. Montesquieu’s message is not that climate determines the political fate of a nation and its people via a route paved by the character of people that popular myths attribute to them. His argument is that as governments have to exercise power in the world, when introducing laws, legislators have to attend to a wide range of physical and social aspects: they present mundane conditions for a government that has to be able to act and maintain itself. So, “bad legislators are those who have favored the vices of the climate and good ones are those who have opposed them” (XIV, 5). As “we do nothing better than what we do freely and by following our natural genius,” legislators are advised “to follow the spirit of a nation,” but only “when doing so is not contrary to the principles of the government” (XIX, 5, italics added). “Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result,” Montesquieu wrote (XIX, 4). Hegel would take the “general spirit” for a nation’s Geist, but that concept has misplaced idealistic overtones. What Montesquieu has in mind is more mundane; namely, what today is called an “actor–network”12 which — because it is made up by many, heterogeneous relations — succeeds in continuing its existence and as such shows some coherence and order.

12 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social — An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Clearly, given all the relations that “govern men,” to establish a moderate government that is allowed to act and maintain itself is no easy task. Many aspects have to be attended to, social as well as physical ones. Hence, it is easy to understand why “despite men’s love of liberty, despite their hatred of violence, most peoples are subjected to despotism”: “In order to form a moderate government, one must combine powers, regulate them, temper them, make them act; one must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another; this is a masterpiece of legislation that chance rarely produces and prudence is rarely allowed to produce” (V, 14). So, here is why Montesquieu thinks climate has to do with law and liberty: liberty is not something pregiven, awarded to all men by birth; it results from proper legislation; it has to be realized on Earth; to enable it, legislators have to attend to the earthly conditions of their region, like climate. IV.

MONTESQUIEU’S political preferences have been the subject of debate among historians. He has been called a republican, a liberal monarchist, and an aristocratic liberal. His main concern may have been the risk that the French monarchy might degenerate into despotism. The French monarchy is no longer anyone’s concern and the principle of separation of powers has been incorporated in the outlook and institutions of liberal democracies. It is perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, that by now Montesquieu is mainly stud- Fig. 3: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth ied by historians. In political theory, apart from Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), frontispiece. reverences for having articulated the importance of the principle of the separation of powers, his work is given lit- Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) (where the sovereign, made tle thought, if it is not ridiculed by the likes of Bourdieu for up from the people, rises above city and countryside) that has the role it attributes to climate. dominated modern political thought. However, now that our understanding of the relations beWith only few exceptions — like John Dewey13 — politics tween human activities and the Earth have changed and the old is conceived conventionally in terms of human agency, power, questions about the relation between climate and people have interests, identities, values, and preferences. To distinguish poto be tabled again, Montesquieu’s work deserves serious atten- litical from social questions, Hannah Arendt excavated from the tion. Of course, most of his empirical observations about peo- ancient Greek language the concept of “action” — “the only ples and the physiology of sensibilities are based on unreliable human activity that goes directly between men without the intersources — they can be neglected. His relationist style of polit- mediary of things or matter” 14 — to subsequently identify political reasoning, however, offers a realistic alternative to the es- ical action with the human faculty of beginning, of taking an tablished way of thinking about politics by situating poli- initiative and to lead. The main questions asked about politics tics and government in the mundane world, rather than above are then “who leads”; “who has power”; “who is master, who it — a view on politics famous- has to obey”; or, in Lenin’s words, “кто кого?” 15 (who whom? 13 See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New ly captured by the frontispiece of — who does what to whom?). All of that is grist to the mill for York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927).

14 Arendt, The Human Condition, 7, italics added. 15 Supposedly formulated by Lenin during a Congress in 1921, it was first published in Leon Trotsky, “Towards Socialism or Towards Capitalism?,” The Labour Monthly 7, no. 11 (1925): 659–68.

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academic treatises, as well as newspaper columns. But it stands in the way of seriously rethinking politics for the Anthropocene. To discuss the relation between land and people, the exclusive focus on human agency leaves only two options; namely, either to bluntly deny agency, free will, and initiative to other peoples — the choice of reactionaries — or — an option suggested by Bruno Latour and Timothy Lenton16 — to extend the “domain of freedom” radically to include nonhumans (or at least nonhuman life forms), and to conceive a new kind of democratic polis which places all “life forms at a distance from one another but not the distance that used to paralyze humans and nature.” 17 Given the crisis we have to face, the latter may appear an appropriate worldview, but it fails to single out the specific role of politics in the world; that is, to address the question what should be undertaken and how power is to be exercised to maintain life on Earth and liberty. By introducing a relationist style of reasoning which does not take continuity of existence for granted, Montesquieu opened up a way to address questions about the relation between climate and people empirically, in relationist terms. As his own concerns were mainly moderate government and liberty, Montesquieu focused on one direction of this relation only: to allow a people to enjoy liberty and moderation, legislators should not only take terrestrial (physical and social) matters into account, but put their energies into enacting appropriate laws — including laws that oppose the vices of climate. The

other direction of the relation, he left out of discussion; he put his trust in God’s wisdom to have created a world that, ruled by invariable (physical) laws, would continue to exist (see I, 1). In the Anthropocene, we can no longer share this confidence. Due to the effects of human activities, the continuity of life on Earth is now at stake; and hence, to conceive Earth, one has to bring its relations with humans into play as well. Of course, by now we do that regularly, like when we are discussing the environment, the economy, or health — but not when we are thinking about politics. Then, as depicted by the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, we are inclined to think we are talking about something that rises far above the earthy world. So, here’s a plan for reinventing politics and for readdressing questions about the relation between climate and people. Start conceiving politics in relationist terms; that is, as the business of adding relations for exercising power to afford continuity of life and liberty on Earth, to bring reflection and moderation into the many things that govern men, “climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores and manners” (IV, 19). Surely, it will require us to go beyond Montesquieu, as we shall have to rethink in relationist terms the basic concepts we usually take for granted in thinking about and discussing politics — like space and borders, representation, citizenship, identity, history, the public and the private realm. But we owe it to the one planet we live on, Earth, where climate has to do with law and liberty.

16 Bruno Latour and Timothy M. Lenton, “Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to Understand,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 659–80. 17 Ibid., 680.

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C

A

B

Landscape and Hybrid Sedimentology Matthieu Duperrex I WOULD ARGUE that “reading a landscape” is increasingly becoming a matter of deciphering the intertwining of natural and anthropic sedimentary processes that characterizes it. The Holocene has actually seen humans progressively advance to become the leading force in modifying the composition and destination of soils.1 At least 50 gigatons of “matter” — including sands, gravel, clay, ferrous minerals, coal etc., slag and waste included — is exploited or extracted annually. If we assume an average density of that matter of 1.5 t/m3, that represents a volume of 30 cubic kilometers.2 So much for what is traditionally termed extractivism (see Paul Jobin, this volume, xxx-xxx). However, as a comparison, the quantity of earth moved annually for crop growing is quantified at 2,505 cubic kilometers!3 Deliberate movements of sediment on the planet represent almost three times more matter than the oceans receive from the terrestrial hydrographic system.4 Hence the need, as I see it, to integrate this dynamic, and not merely stratigraphic, sedimentology into the aesthetics of the landscape. 100

1 See Lucas Stephens et al., “Archaeological Assessment Reveals Earth’s Early Transformation through Land Use,” Science, 365, no. 6456 (2019): 897–902. 2 See Norman S. Jennings, “Mining and Quarrying,” in Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, ed. J.R. Armstrong and R. Menon (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2011), chap. 74. www.ilocis.org/documents/chpt74e.htm. 3 See Matt Edgeworth et al., “Diachronous Beginnings of the Anthropocene: The Lower Bounding Surface of Anthropogenic Deposits,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 33–58. 4 See Jason M. Kelly et al., eds., Rivers of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

Let us take the case of an area of semi-arid steppe land, the Crau plain beside Marseille (France), which stretches over an old alluvial fan of the river Durance (see fig. A). On the surface, the gravel is consolidated into puddingstone, which may be more than seven meters thick. I pick up one of these Crau plain puddingstones dating from the Pliocene, a conglomerate with a characteristic appearance. As I handle this ordinary piece of stone, I can travel back several millennia in my mind — if not indeed millions of years. I can imagine how the great south-eastern basin of France was formed, between the Massif Central and the present-day Alps, how the sediments accumulated there, and then how the soil has slowly slipped away. The Gulf of Lion in the Mediterranean originated from a collapse of this type. Since that time or an adjacent period, there have been two Crau plains — that of Arles, which rests on the marine Pliocene, and that of Miramas, where I am standing now, which dates from the Quaternary. The river Durance changed its course and became a tributary of the Rhône. In

the same period, the Canal de Caronte became submerged, joining the Étang de Berre lagoon (see fig. B) to the sea. The variations in substrate caused the Gulf of Fos to sink and the Berre region to rise, this latter now being one of the largest saline lagoons in Europe. Between the Gulf of Fos and Berre, lower than sea level, is another sunken geological formation which gave birth to six lakes — l’Étang de l’Engrenier, de l’Olivier, du Lavalduc (see fig. C), de l’Estomac, du Pourra, and de Rassuen. Moving up the Durance further to the east, at Manosque, the tectonics of the Oligocene fostered a form of sedimentation favorable to the accumulation of salt. Prospecting in 1958 revealed this saline deposit in the Manosque-Lubéron anticline. To read this landscape now as a decisive part of the Critical Zone is to note how the frescoes of the great geological picture are colored by the palette of the “Moderns,”5 and particularly by their power to mobilize sediments. With this pebble I am holding, this piece of Pliocene puddingstone whose asperities and nodules I touch,

E

D

5 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). First published in French as Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1991).

I can, then, conjure up a new imaginary. This involves the successive barrages and levees on the Durance. And the Durance penstock pipe that comes out, after a 70-meter fall, at the hydroelectric power station at Saint-Chamas. And the freshwater of the Durance that dilutes the saltwater of the “petite mer de Berre” by five times its volume. And salt again that brings the Durance to Manosque, to bore salt caverns 300 meters deep by 50 meters wide using high-pressure water jets. And the brine produced by this procedure that is used as a piston in the cavities, in order to fill them hermetically with oil or empty them. And the excess of brine that leaves by pipeline (see fig. D) 80 kilometers from there to be stored in the Étang de Lavalduc and the Étang de l’Engrenier lakes. From Lavalduc, the salt goes off to the Étang de Berre, to the Compagnie des Salins du Midi et des Salines de l’Est. Otherwise, I suppose one might very well ask how there could still be saltpans on the Étang de Berre… It is from Berre that we find the pipeline that runs through the Canal de Caronte and connects to

FIGS: A— Matthieu Duperrex, the Crau plain with the Air Liquide industrial plant in the background, 2016. Photograph. B— Matthieu Duperrex, the Étang de Berre, a lagoon about 25 km northwest of Marseille, with the LyondellBasell oil refinery in the background, 2016. Photograph. C— Matthieu Duperrex, the Étang de Lavalduc saltwater lagoon with various Fossur-Mer industries in the background, 2018. Photograph. D — Matthieu Duperrex, the

Lavéra. And one stretch of this will go back up through France, following the line of the Rhône, while another will return to Manosque, where the refined and the crude oil are stored — nine million cubic meters… And there is the widened Canal de Caronte that one can follow on to the canal that runs from Port-de-Bouc to Fos-surMer and comes out in Harbor Basin no. 1 of the Port Autonome de Marseille in Fos-sur-Mer, the very harbor basin the engineers weren’t able to dig as deep as they would have liked because of the Crau gravel. And the chlorinated water in the Gulf of Fos (see fig. E), which industry discharges after its cooling processes, chlorinated water that measures three times the volume of the Gulf per annum. And the freshwater from the Étang du Landre lake and the Canal du Vigueirat which is pumped up to the ArcelorMittal steelworks. It is by following the Canal du Vigueirat and the Canal du Colmatage, that we find the main fresh groundwater resurgence of the Crau plain. This new imaginary also involves the anti-salt barrier built at the confluence with the Canal de

Géosel pipeline replacement project (for oil and brine), near the commune Berrel’Étang, 2019. Photograph. E— Matthieu Duperrex, the Gulf of Fos, view from Portde-Bouc, with the ArcelorMittal steel plant and strategic French oil reserves in the background, 2018. Photograph.

navigation d’Arles à Bouc, so that seawater does not travel further up and onto the land. And, with the sea rising nonetheless, and with this level increasing because of global warming, the land dependent on the hydraulic system is in danger of flooding, for industries need freshwater and therefore must have watertight compartments between freshwater and saltwater. It involves the sea rising and getting into the Rhône delta, into the sediments, over kilometers of inland areas. It includes the sea level rising and pushing back the coastline of Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer. And the river Rhône flowing into the Mediterranean, bringing with it its sediments polluted by the Lyon chemical corridor and by agricultural runoff. And the sediments that no longer settle in the delta, on account of the dykes. And the whole of the Camargue which is subsiding, sinking lower and lower as the sea level gets higher… A critical landscape.

Translated from the French by Chris Turner. 101

A

Words for a Tongue We Are Losing

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL3EjH9-WSs. 2 https://www.facebook.com/LibraBuzz/videos/ryan-sticks-his-tongue-to-a-pole/ 1160150730787987/.

Stefanie Rau LIKE A FROZEN R IVER , white and grey, like a snapshot of a movement. A paralyzed motion that appears as if it could awake any second from a deep sleep. The photographic representations reinforce this impression, but in this case (see fig. A) we are looking at images frozen in time. Images that when compared with pictures taken ten, fifty, or one hundred years ago reveal the movement of the ice, its gradual disappearance. The ice gushes from the mountain, pushing itself over the crust of the rocks. It looks as though it is growing and shrinking at the same time. An untamed movement that dissolves the solid structure into water, rushing into the valleys, sculpting its way into the sea. The glacier tongue — die Gletscherzunge — becomes narrow, short, it shrinks. It does not lick and swallow the liquid, which is gathering in a mouth, but it becomes liquid itself. It dissolves more and more and undergoes a physical transformation, constantly in transition. The cold and hard tongue loses its form, and thus its spatial and temporal fixation, while 102

our tongues are locked in mouths like in closed ecosystems. Tongues that speak languages that help us locate ourselves in entanglements from which we cannot escape. The ice of the glaciers melts unstoppably and becomes part of a cycle that we accelerate through our existence. INTERLUDE 1 “Glacier Calving, Huge Wave”1 From a boat a shaky camera is observing the Holgate Glacier. “Oh, look at this,” the man behind the camera says, while chunks of ice break into the water. “Sounds like artillery,” he says. The camera swings around and we briefly see the other people on the boat — the audience — holding their cameras in the air, shooting in the same direction. “I can’t believe it,” we hear the voice of a child, while the spectacle unfolds and in quicker intervals more and more ice collapses from the blindingly white, light blue wall. “Holy

cow!” “Whooohoho!” The reactions from the people on the boat get louder every time the ice crashes into the sea. Finally, a huge section goes down within seconds. The crowd on the boat cheers, laughs, and screams. “Here comes the water,” the guy behind the camera says. Slowly the weight that has crashed into the water moves like a dusty avalanche towards the boat. “Look at that!” … “Whooutch!” The camera shakes while the boat turns away at full speed, carried by the force of the huge wave. The people on the boat cheer like on a rollercoaster ride “OK, that was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.” THE TER M “glacier tongue” turns the glacier into an organ. It anthropomorphizes our understanding and relationship to the environment. It draws a connection with a body part, with which we perceive taste and touch on the one hand, and express ourselves with on the other. The tongue is an essential part of what enables us to speak,

B

FIGS: A— Unknown, Rhône Glacier, 1894. Photograph, b/w, 18×24 cm. B— Upsala Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina, January 7, 2008.Colored TerraSAR-X image (strip mode).

it modulates the sounds we can produce into distinct pronunciations. In English, “mother tongue” describes the language that we grew up with — unsere Muttersprache. The language that we speak without having to reflect on the movement of our tongue. It is the language into which we have been born, and thus into circumstances and conditions. Yet it is precisely this relationship we have to rethink when we speak of “mother nature”: A life-giving and nurturing female figure as an equivalent for complicated interrelationships of living organisms of which human beings are only relegated to a tiny part. The relationship that we hold to what has been called mother nature is one that we struggle to articulate, to overcome the distinction between culture and nature. INTERLUDE 2 “Ryan Sticks His Tongue to a Pole” 2 We see a little boy whose mouth is wide open and his tongue is stuck to a metal

pole. His face shows utter distress and he’s screaming incomprehensibly. We see how another child laughingly jumps around the pole and the voice of a man says: “It’s alright, it’s alright.” The man appears with a cup of hot liquid and pours — what appears to be hot chocolate — onto the tongue at the pole. It takes two splashes until Ryan slips his tongue back into his mouth. The camera stays close to his face and seconds later he sticks out his bloody tongue, starting to burst into tears, running towards the car standing close by. The camera turns to a girl, probably the older sister, who smiles and speaks to the camera: “I knew this was gonna happen one day.” In the last few seconds of the video the camera turns into a quiet observer of the situation. A small child, eyes wide open, but speechlessly still staring at the pole. The woman behind the camera asks: “What did Ryan do?” The child shrugs and gives

no answer. “You don’t know?” The child silently shakes his head. THE TONGUE in our mouth, the muscle that so flexibly moves around our oral cavity, works as a sensor. Taste receptors on the surface of the tongue enable us to differentiate between different nutrients — not a purely human affair but a collaborative process of multiple bacteria. Just like the ice on the surface of the glacier tongue absorbs chemical components: the powdery dust of a combination of small rock particles, soot, and microbes is deposited on the ice layers, darkens its color, and thus reduces the reflectivity of the ice. This absorbs solar radiation and accelerates the melting process of snow and ice. Like the coating on the tongue is read as a symptom of a supposedly sick body, the glacier tongue also indicates a critical condition. It tastes the transformation of the Earth and the conserved histories within the ice are gradually dissolving. Histories that are only being translated from a language we have never learned are disappearing just as we begin to read them (see fig. B). 103

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Geognosy

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1 See Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference, trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith, Paul Babinski, and Helmut Müller-Sievers (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 47–52. 2 Novalis, Henry of Ofterdingen (Cambridge: John Owen, 1842), 203. Originally published in German as Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Realschule, 1802), in the original German: “‘Wo gehen wir denn hin?’ ‘Immer nach Hause.’” 3 On the location of the Schinderloch, see Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Caspar David Friedrich und die Sächsische Schweiz. Skizzen, Motive, Bilder (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 40f.

Joseph Leo Koerner ROMANTIC ERDKUNDE — the pursuit of precious “tidings” that Earth might bring — required pursuers to cast their most attentive gaze not up at the skies, like astronomers and cosmologists, or at the world around them, like geographers and mapmakers, but downward at the earth underfoot. Such an effort was fraught with difficulty. Nomadic creatures, human beings live in perpetual motion from any given place of personal or tribal origin, and the ground underfoot is opaque and impenetrable. Enlightenment geography took this for granted, inscribing Earth’s indifferent surface in an abstract geometric grid. This grid was indifferent to substance, and it was unable unequivocally to determine a concrete place because the irregular rotating sphere of the Earth has discernible south and north poles, due to its magnetic field, but no natural east and west to complete the coordinates of a “here.”1 In their programmatic rejection of Enlightenment geographers and cartographers, the German practitioners of Erdkunde searched for this elusive “here,” always mindful that it would 104

have to elude them “now,” in their always already Zingg and Anton Graff who had been appointexiled and transient condition. Their downward ed to the Dresden Art Academy in 1766. They gaze, along the vertical axis of an upright human had pioneered sketching tours of the region’s being, therefore had to also be backward, toward remarkable sandstone formations. Friedrich aswhat they called Heimat (home) and Ursprung pired to membership in the Dresden academy, (origin, or source), as well as forward, which probably in the category of landscape painting they imagined as a utopic return: “Whither are — his early forays into history painting were unwe going?” asks the Pilgrim in Novalis’s Henry of promising. In 1799 he undertook a hiking tour Ofterdingen (1802), to which a mysterious “young of Saxon Switzerland, followed by a second one, girl” responds: “Ever homewards.”2 in 1800, that extended from July until SeptemA sheet of paper preserved in the Staatliche ber. In drawings made during these excursions, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe finds the artist Caspar Da- many of them dated, the artist captured isolatvid Friedrich gazing intently into a cleft in the ed bits of the natural world (especially trees and landscape (see fig.A).The date and place where this boulders) along with picturesque ruins and widinvestigation occurred has been penciled into its er vistas. Friedrich rendered the isolated bits with depiction: “Schinderloch den 7 t Juli 1800.” The an almost obsessive accuracy, as if everything Schinderloch is a natural crevasse in the moun- depended on the unique signature of this alder, tains south of Dresden, Germany, along the these branches, this balanced stone. Later, in paintElbe River.3 Born in Greifswald and trained at ings made in the monastic enclosure of his stuthe Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Friedrich dio (some executed decades after the sketch was had settled in Dresden permanently in 1798. The made), the meticulous outlines would be transElbe mountains had been given the name “Sax- ferred quasi-mechanically to the canvas, giving on Switzerland” by the two Swiss artists Adrian his landscapes the uncanny specificity of a déjà vu.

C

FIGS: A— Caspar David Friedrich, “Schin-

derloch den 7 t Juli 1800,” 1800. Pencil and black chalk on paper, 37 × 23 cm. B— Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, in Essai sur la géographie des plantes (Paris: Levrault, Schoell et Compagnie, 1805). C— Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1818. Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm.

At the Schinderloch — the name, by the way, indicates a hole for depositing carcasses (especially diseased ones) by a Schinder, one who skins and buries animals — Friedrich seems to have fixed his gaze on the cleft, or rather, on the cleft’s barely visible presence above ground, in dark recessions meandering beneath the rocks and soil. To indicate these recessions, which cannot themselves quite be seen from the artist’s view across to the Schinderloch, he has turned his pencil’s volume up, as it were, to ten and deposited areas of thick graphite on the page. And to these intense graphic marks that almost threaten to tear into the laid paper’s surface he adds a cloaked figure who, steadying himself on the boulder beside him, peers downward into the hidden crevasse. This wanderer serves to establish scale. Without him, the huge boulder might be read as a mere rock or stone. And without him, the darkness under the boulder might read merely as a shadow or furrow on the ground. But dressed for travel and turned away from us and looking downward, he also transforms the nature study

into the record of a personal, subjective experience: Friedrich’s encounter of the Schinderloch on that day in July in the first year of the nineteenth century. And the encounter that the figure shows took place there, and that Friedrich elevates to the status of a meaningful experience, or Erlebnis, was one of seeing something undepictable except by way of the turned traveler: the glimpse down into — or more accurately, the intuition of — an opening in the Earth. This intuition of the Earth’s interior was one of the great leitmotifs of Romanticism. It informed, and was itself powerfully informed by, the engagement of many of Germany’s prominent poets, philosophers, and scientists in mines and mining. Alexander von Humboldt and Novalis, as well as natural philosophers Henrik Steffens and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert and geologists Christian Leopold von Buch and Friedrich Mohs, were all alumni of the Freiberg Mining Academy, founded in 1775 by Abraham Gottlob Werner. The son of a nobleman who oversaw all the salt mines of Saxony, Novalis himself

became a regional “saltworks director” and “saltworks assessor.” His many literary and speculative excursions into mines, caves, and caverns had practical and empirical grounding in efforts toward regional enrichment through innovative exploration and exploitation of local natural resources. Goethe, too, spent years trying to revive the abandoned silver and copper mines at Ilmenau, near Weimar. This typically cameralist undertaking was the poet’s greatest failure. It inspired the remarkable opening scenes of the final act of Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy, which involves Faust’s murderous land-reclamation project. Humboldt’s Naturgemälde was inspired by mining, as well. Its transformation of a horizontal landscape view into a vertical cross-section and its extension at the base into the underground and underwater world of fungi and marine plants are legacies of mine diagrams and designs (see fig. B). Humboldt, along with other German Romantics including the amateur painter and Friedrich-disciple Carl Gustav Carus, practiced what 105

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F

E

4 Abraham Gottlob Werner, Klassifikation und Beschreibung der verschiedenen Gebirgsarten (Dresden, 1787), 4; see also Alexander von Humboldt, A Geognostical Essay on the Superposition of Rocks in Both Hemispheres (London, 1823), 67. 5 Carl Gustav Carus, “Letter VII,” in Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2002), 116–20, here 118. Originally published in German as Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, geschrieben in den Jahren 1815–1824 (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1831), 112–20. See also Oskar Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869): Physician, Naturalist, Painter, and Theoretician of Landscape Painting,” in Nine Letters, 1–73, here 43. 6 Henrik Steffens, “Über die Vegetation” [1808], in Schriften Alt und Neu, vol. 2 (Breslau: Joseph Mar, 1821), 36–109, here 102. Translated from the German.

Werner termed “geognosy” — roughly, the investigation and knowledge of the mineral masses of the Earth’s crust.4 Geognosy attempted to read the surface of the Earth as cryptic sign indication of internal and invisible processes. In his proposal for a new type of landscape painting Erdlebenbildkunst (literally, “Earth-life image art”), Carus exhorted artists to express the structure and history of mountains through their form. This meant delving underneath their surface by conducting geognosy oneself, or by following the research of others conducted in geognosy. It also meant allowing the knowledge thus gained to correct and to clarify from-life portrayals of the natural world.5 That this subterranean interior lay hidden from sight heightened its allure. Novalis imagined the “Blue Flower” of Romantic longing to grow deep underground, at the base of a mountain. Envisioned in a dream within a fable within his fragmentary novel Henry of Ofterdingen, the flower could be reached through an underground passageway, of which only the entrance could be glimpsed. 106

7 On the challenge of Earth’s age to Kant and modern philosophy, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: continuum, 2008), 3–13. Originally published in French as Après la finitude (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006). See more recently Christophe Bouton, “Dealing with Deep Time: The Issue of Ancestrality from Kant to Hegel,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 69–70 (2018): 38–51. 8 I am indebted to Kaila Howell for her eco-critical reading of Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice in “Romantic Anthropocene: The Problem of Temporality in a Painting by Caspar David Friedrich,” unpublished doctoral Qualifying Paper, Harvard University, 2019.

For impatient seekers, there were other ways down. “Do you want to know nature?” asked Henrik Steffens in an essay on vegetation published in 1808: “Then cast a glance into your own interior, and in the strata of mental formation it may be granted you to behold the developmental strata of nature. Do you want to know yourself? Investigate nature, and its actions are also those of that mind.” 6 The Romantic self and the subterranean world were equal and polar opposite immensities. When, in Caspar David Friedrich, the halted traveler looks down from a great height onto the dizzying foggy expanse, the infinity he sees corresponds to his infinite interior, which is why his heart seems to be the emanating source of everything he beholds (see fig. C). Where other landscape painters posit the viewer standing before and looking across at the vista, Friedrich frequently shows him or her looking downward, contemplating an abyss or even, strangely, the moon as if from above it. In this artist’s world, this vertical gaze down to

and into the Earth has a powerful temporal dimension, since it confronts the layered sediment of Earth’s history back to creation. The discovery in the eighteenth century, by James Hutton and others, of deep time was at least as humiliating to an anthropocentric understanding of the world as had been Copernicus’s new spatial model of the universe. Kant’s assertion that we cannot know anything beyond our relation to, and representation of, the world balks at dates of the Earth’s beginnings, which cause the history of human perceptions and representation of the world to look like flashes in an endless night.7 Friedrich tried to envision this unimaginable temporal immensity by setting the human time of experience and history off against geological time. In two of his extant paintings, derelict tombs and monuments of German heroes mark the entrance to caves as mismatched pendants to the course of natural history (see figs. D and E). In Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice, painted in 1823– 24, a ship, wrecked and abandoned in some moment in the past, is now being swallowed by ice

G

D— Caspar David Friedrich, Tombs of the

Fallen in the Fight for Independence, 1812. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 70.5 cm. E— Caspar David Friedrich, Cave with Tomb, ca. 1813–14. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 70.5 cm. F— Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823–24. Oil on canvas, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm. G— Caspar David Friedrich, Ledge on Ocean Beach, 1824. Oil on canvas, 22 × 31 cm.

at an altogether different speed than the pace of the disaster itself: at the scale of years, or perhaps of a human life (see fig. F).8 Catastrophe’s temporality slows, quite literally, to glacial speed even as the teetering tower of ice might suddenly collapse — though who would see and hear that calamity? And beyond the measure of ice flow, Friedrich establishes a vaster temporality. Repeating in smoothed-out form the structure of the foreground iceberg, the ice mountain in the distance measures time in eons. The spatial

sublimity of landscape, expressed through colossal blocks of ice and vast expanses of space, finds here its correlative in a temporal sublime. Very soon after painting The Sea of Ice, Friedrich turned that distant ice mountain into a rock reef jutting from a calm moonlit sea (see fig. G). Housed in Karlsruhe along with the drawing of the Schinderloch, the small masterpiece Ledge on OceanBeach (1824) melts (as it were) the sea of ice depicted in his monumental canvas. Showing a crystalline object near but

unattainable by the human (since no ship can land on that reef ), Friedrich pushes time back to the beginning, when the waters were separated from land. And he brings these tidings of deep time forward to our here and now, when, in a terrible about-face, humans have realized that, for the first time in Earth’s history, our form of life and our temporality have so speeded up geologic time that our ruin, and our distress, can be beheld.

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III.

1

Critical Zones

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Author, Title, 0000. Technique, 000 × 000 misure

CRI T I C A L Z ON E S If the disconnection between the world we live in and the world we live from is really the cause of the disorientation mentioned above, then the remedy is clear: We should find ways to decrease the distance between the two worlds, so as to begin our landing on Earth — without crashing.

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bedrock.” And Dietrich expresses again the same surHIn this section, we begin the first of three steps leading prise as Brantley: “The Critical Zone is where we live and, down to Earth by having its main protagonists present the surprisingly, it is also a frontier area of research.” scientific domain called the Critical Zone. The paradox is Why? Because this Earth physiology completethat what should be utterly familiar to us is also the least ly transforms the description of what a landscape is. As understood, what Jérôme Gaillardet calls for this reason a terra incognita: “This pulverulent layer, colonized by liv- Daniel D. Richter, another Critical Zonist, and Sharon A. ing organisms, is the thin coat of varnish upon which hu- Billings explain: “The Critical Zone is defined by the slomanity has established itself, the precious layer which we gan ‘from tree top to bedrock,’ by its fluids ‘from the atmosphere to the deepest of circulating groundwaters,’ cultivate and build upon, and it is the sponge from which we draw our water and in which we store our waste prod- and by its temporality ‘across human, biologic, and geologic time.’” This zonal reach is enough to expand collabucts … It does not include the rocks or the air; it is the permeable zone on the Earth’s surface with many differ- oration among many established disciplines. Essential to the collaborative work of the Critical ent shapes and features: soil, groundwater, river, trees, swamps, glaciers and so on.” There is a clear tension be- Zonists are long-term and well instrumented research sites. The solution was to choose specific watersheds tween viewing the Earth as a planetary body floating in space and considering such a tiny biofilm from the inside. and to equip them with enough instruments to decrease the distance between lab results and field data. Hence If this new science is so important, it is because it tries the creation of an international network of Critical Zone to bridge the gap in between those two scientific world views: that of the planet and that of the Critical Zone. No Observatories (CZOs). As shown by Alexandra Arènes and then by Marie-Claire Pierret in one specific case, the wonder that we might feel lost in it, even though this is Strengach site in Alsace, it is through the careful instruthe only world we have ever experienced. The reason for our ignorance is visible when you con- mentation of these sites that people are learning to inhabsider the paradigm at the heart of this new interdiscipli- it them in a new way. And the same is true of the unfortunate trees in Paris as illustrated by Aleksandar Rankovic. nary field: There exists a wide gap between what can be Which gives still another meaning to the adjective observed in the laboratory and what happens in situ and in vivo. As Susan Brantley puts it: “When we estimat- “critical”: “Thus to study the Critical Zone, scientists study critical places, as Alexander von Humboldt had already ed rates of reactions in nature, we discovered they were always slower, sometimes almost a million times slower, understood when he wrote in his famous book Cosmos than our measured lab rates. Many people puzzled over that ‘every where, in every separate portion of the earth, this.” It really meant, as Brantley argues, devising a new nature is indeed only a reflex of the whole’” (Jérôme Gailrole for “Earth physicians”: “In Earth surface science be- lardet). As Simon Schaffer shows, this link between a fore 2004, we didn’t have many GPs [general practition- network of instruments, the conception of an animated ers]. That’s why many of us pushed to create a new type Earth, and worries about the development of the human of scientific GP. We created Critical Zone Science to fo- race, industry, and resources is not new. Critical Zone cus on studying the Earth’s surface – from air to trees Science is but one episode in the attempt to build one to water to rocks to humans.” It’s about time that land of those cosmograms that John Tresch proposes in the first section. benefits from what patients have in medicine, namely a It is because these zones are so odd that art is indiswell instrumented emergency room! “Earthcastings” are pensable for giving them a provisional shape as is done as crucial to cope with life-threatening diseases as are magnificently in the sculptures of Sarah Sze discussed by prognoses for cancers or strokes. The reason for this distance between what happens in Bruno Latour. Hence the right use of the word “zones” in the laboratory and what happens in the field is, of course, the plural to describe such terra incognita. Jeanne Etelain, the emergence of life forms which have endlessly com- in her brief history of the term, from Greek belts to erogplicated the running of chemical processes. As William E. enous zones, offers a perfect transition for what comes next, the second step in landing on Earth, namely Gaia. Dietrich puts it: “Suddenly, I saw that the slow workings of geologic processes, that shape hills, weather to a porous stone the underlying bedrock and produce a mobile soil, were driven by biotic processes that enhanced the storage of water (and nutrients) to life itself: a co-evolving system connected from canopy top down to fresh

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The Critical Zone, a Buffer Zone, the Human Habitat Jérôme Gaillardet The Critical Zone: Using Sun’s Energy to Transform Rocks

THE EARTH IS a rocky planet and one of the inner planets of the solar system (third planet from the sun). “Rocky” refers to the fact that it is made of a particular class of minerals called silicates — made of silicon, oxygen, and magnesium. The original atmosphere surrounding it was formed by degassing from the Earth’s molten interior during an early stage of the planet’s formation. This original atmosphere contained mainly carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water. While nitrogen is an inert gas, carbon dioxide and water combine to form a very aggressive chemical compound — carbonic acid — which reacts with silicates and destroys them; it dissolves them and transforms them into new, lighter, hydrated minerals. This vast neutralization reaction, in the sense of the nineteenth century French and German chemists who first understood its importance,1 forms continuously yet almost invisibly new materials that accumulate in a soft and porous film on the surface of continents. This pulverulent layer, colonized by living organisms, is the thin coat of varnish upon which humanity has established itself, the precious layer which we cultivate and build upon, and it is the sponge from which we draw our water and in which we store our waste products. Scientists studying the Earth call this near-surface layer the “Critical Zone.” It does not include the rocks or the air; it is the permeable zone on the Earth’s surface with many different shapes and features: soil, groundwater, river, trees, swamps, glaciers, and so on. We do not live on Earth, but on a thin film, barely visible on a planetary view, a conflict zone between two energy sources. The first is the internal energy of the planet which cools down and allows the formation of new material, such as volcanic rocks, the degassing of deep carbon dioxide, and the formation of mountains by plate tectonics. The second source of energy is that of the sun, which activates the water cycle by evaporating water from the Earth’s surface and the vast oceans that cover 70 percent of the surface of our planet, creating clouds and rainwater, which dissolves carbon dioxide. Even though the amount of energy brought by the sun to the Earth over a surface area of 1 square meter is 500 times greater than that released by internal cooling, both sources of energy have been and are necessary for the dynamics of the Crit1 See Matthieu Emmanuel Galvez and Jérôme Gaillardet, ical Zone and both participate “Historical constraints on the origins of the carbon cyin the evolution of life. In this cle concept,” Comptes Rendus Geoscience 344, no. 11–12 (2012): 549–67. sense, the notion of the Critical 2 See Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere [1926], (New Zone is close to the concept of the York: Copernicus, 1998). Originally published in Russian as Biosfera (Leningrad: Nauchnoe khimiko-technicheskoye izdatel’stvo [Scientific Chemico-Technical Publishing], 1926).

3 See Susan L. Brantley, James D. Kubicki, and Art F. White, eds., Kinetics of Water-Rock Interaction (New York: Springer, 2008).

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Fig. 1: Alexandra Arènes, Representations of the deep Earth energy at the center of the Earth and the solar energy at the surface of the Earth, two complementary energy sources, 2019. Visualization.

biosphere that was coined and introduced by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in 1875 and elaborated by Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky in the early twentieth century.2 The term “Critical Zone” was first used in its current sense in 2001 by the U.S. National Research Council and its study was born historically from the observed mismatch between the

results from experimental physics and chemistry (lab experiments) and field observations.3 The Critical Zone is such a composite, heterogeneous environment — soil, gas, water, cells, genes, all connected — that it has to be addressed by very different branches of science, ranging from pure physics to geography, geology, hydrology, pedology, geomorphology, geology, ecology, and biology; disciplines that in the history of science have been separate for more than two centuries, not to mention the social and human sciences. As impressive as the progress of knowledge has been over the past two centuries, the study of the Critical Zone as a system has been sidelined. The concept of ecosystem, originally very close to the current concept of the Critical Zone, has gradually focused on organisms by opposing the “biotic” and “abiotic” factors; pedology has focused on the uppermost 30–60 cm of the Earth; hydrology concentrates on the complex water system; geomorphology on landforms; and geochemists have developed extremely sophisticated analytical tools to track the behavior of particular chemical elements; however, a multidisciplinary synthesis has not been attempted. The institutions have locked up disciplines in academic fortresses that are oriented on the study of certain compartments of the Critical Zone, while forgetting the “whole.” Nowadays, a student who studies ecology will not necessarily take geology classes; a chemist will not study the formation of salt rock deposits; a modeler will not be involved in data acquisition. In France, for example, one state institution is responsible for measuring the discharge of rivers, and another for measuring the water table of aquifers! At the same time, the Critical Zone has become so crucial for societies that it has been hijacked by various disciplines and subdisciplines which address the same questions using different languages and with different approaches. This compartmentalization and multiplicity of Critical Zone representations make predictions difficult because processes playing out at short time periods (such as weather events) are not studied in association with processes that play out at longer timescales (such as the formation of cultivable soils). This also hampers the awareness of humans as to the fragility of the Critical Zone, as a single entity, as an object, which is their habitat (see fig. 1).

On a small scale, by dissolving rock minerals, the reactions occurring in the Critical Zone provide the essential elements that allow life to develop (e.g., phosphorus, whose ultimate provenance can only be rock-forming minerals). The reactions happening in the Critical Zone affect the water quality of groundwater, streams, rivers, and seawater because when passing through the Critical Zone, rainwater is loaded with dissolved and solid materials. The reactions of the Critical Zone also determine the shape of the landforms (geomorphology) that surround us and, therefore, the landscape. Finally, on a global scale, the consumption of carbon dioxide by the reactions of the Critical Zone drives the content of this gas in the atmosphere and thus the Earth’s climate, because carbon dioxide is one of the primary greenhouse gases. At the time of its formation, the Earth’s original atmosphere contained more than 90 percent carbon dioxide in volume, a level now reduced to 0.03‰ by the neutralization of rock-forming minerals and the accumulation of biological limestone in the oceans. Despite the

WATER GAZ

→ LOSS OF PARTICLES AT THE SURFACE • PHYSICAL EROSION (RELIEF)

→ LOSS OF DISSOLVED MATTER UNDERGROUND • CHEMICAL EROSION (WATERGROUND)

WEATHERING FRONT

An Interface of the Earth System

THE WORD “CR ITICAL” is important to scientists. The Critical Zone is one of the main and most essential interfaces of the planet whose functioning at different scales makes our planet unique in the solar system. This mobile interface, formed by chemical and physical reactions (weathering) and destroyed by the export of their products (erosion) by rainwater to the oceans — it is often compared to a conveyor belt to express the fact the Critical Zone is a mobile layer under our feet — has many functions for the planet (see fig. 2).

MINERALS

↑ UPLIFT (P) SUPPLY OF MINERALS (TECTONICS)

Fig. 2: Alexandra Arènes, Profile showing the dynamics of formation of the Critical Zone from the tree canopy to the deep rocks, 2019. Visualization.

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steady increase of sun energy received by the Earth, the Earth has not warmed significantly over the last few billion years because reactions in the Critical Zone regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide content by interacting to a greater or lesser extent with rock-forming minerals. Therefore, it is to the Critical Zone that the Earth owes its habitability and sustainability. The Critical Zone in James Lovelock’s theory is an essential ingredient of Gaia (see Lenton and Dutreuil, “What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia?,” this volume, xxx–xxx). A Zone under Threat

THE TER M “CR ITICAL” also means that this zone is not a scientific object like any other: it is a fragile, sensitive interface, to be better described and modeled for the sustainability of humanity on the planet. In the Anthropocene, human impact on the environment has become major. The “Great Acceleration”4 has led to overexploitation of arable land, deterioration of land quality, unprecedented deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and global warming due to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which disrupts the hydrological cycle. Soon, humanity will withdraw 30 percent of the total water flowing through the Critical Zone, waters whose residence times in aquifers, and therefore vulnerabilities, are very variable, ranging from less than a day to a million years; 50 percent of the continental surfaces are exploited by humans, who mobilize a tonnage of various materials (sand, rubble, rocks) approaching 10 times the flux of materials transiting from continents to the oceans5. It is not difficult to calculate that in some parts of the world, irrigation will salinize groundwaters that will then become unusable. Since the adoption of agriculture and the first major deforestations, humanity has modified the Critical Zone: its increased degradation over the last few centuries is undoubtedly one of the most obvious markers of our entry into the Anthropocene. At the same time, unlike the atmosphere or the living organisms, the Critical Zone evolves only slowly, giving us a misleading impression of its immutability (see fig. 3).

living organisms and dead organic matter in decomposition, and that these finely divided materials are associated in aggregates whose reactive surfaces are organized in a fractal manner. It is also necessary to realize that the Critical Zone materials are not fixed; they move continuously carried by air, by rivers, or by humans, and that the water with which they interact follows complicated infiltration paths that are often not known and more or less rapid. The Critical Zone hosts mechanisms with very variable timescales. While it only takes a few seconds for bacteria to reproduce or a couple of days for a tree to pump an excess of soil moisture, it takes tens of thousands of years to transform a mineral into a clay, and a lava flow into cultivable land. Many of the chemical reactions in the Critical Zone, while thermodynamically possible, do not occur for kinetic reasons; they are limited by their slow rates at Earth surface temperature. Dissolving a grain of quartz or zircon in the presence of acidified water by carbon dioxide is possible according to the rules of thermodynamics, but the reactions are very slow and actually do not happen. This is why the river and sand beaches contain so many grains of quartz and zircon: they are largely immutable and survive the rates of formation and destruction of mountains driven by plate tectonics. Most of the other rock-forming minerals dissolve more quickly, but there is still competition in the Critical Zone between the rate of transformation of the minerals and the time that the acidified water resides in contact with them. This competition between the rate of mineral transformation and the residence time of water in the Critical Zone is a major source of complexity when comparing laboratory results to field observations and building predictive mathematical models. Depending on the location, on geomorphological conditions (slope), on climatic and of course biological settings, the Critical Zone is shaped in forms that can be very different. Life, by using enzymes or secreting aggressive substances, counters the slowness of chemical reactions, accelerates them locally, and is therefore an essential ingredient of the transport–reaction

A Scientific Puzzle

4

SCIENTISTS AR E FAR from understanding the integrated functioning of the Critical Zone, which on a planetary scale is so thin, but so crucial for sustaining life. For example, the transformation rates of rock-forming minerals observed in a laboratory beaker (in the lab) are up to ten thousand times faster than those derived from natural observations (in the field) in the Critical Zone.6 To understand why this is so, it is necessary to realize that the Critical Zone is a very heterogeneous and porous medium composed of primary and alSee Will Steffen et al., “The trajectory of the Anthrotered minerals (clays and oxides), pocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98.

5 See David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Fig. 3: After deforestation, the Huay Ma Nai catchment (Thailand) has been submitted to a motorized monoculture of maize resulting in the removal of the fertile top layers and the frequent outcropping of the schistose bedrock.

6 See Brantley, Kubicki, and White, Kinetics of Water-Rock Interaction.

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Fig. 4: Alexandra Arènes, The thickness of the Critical Zone at the planetary scale, 2019. Visualization.

pairing that sculpts the Critical Zone. Life plays a role not only by facilitating the transformation of minerals into clays, oxides, and substances dissolved in water, but also because the decomposition of organic matter on the ground produces gaseous carbon dioxide that accumulates in the pores of the soil at levels 10 to 100 times higher than those existing in the atmosphere, and exacerbates the aggressive nature of rainwater percolating towards aquifers and rivers. By developing a dense fabric of roots and fungal filaments, life also protects this soft layer which sustains it. Whether controlled by living organisms or not, the stability of the Critical Zone depends on a subtle balance between the mechanical and chemical processes that produce it and the processes that destroy it. Landslides, the most spectacular manifestations of sudden degradation of the Critical Zone, can wipe out thousands of years of slow transformations in a few seconds. Freeze–thaw alternation and entrainment by runoff water and glaciers are extremely efficient processes that are controlled by Earth’s gravity, and that contribute to the formation and destruction of this “living skin” of the Earth (see figs. 4 and 5). Fig. 5: Alexandra Arènes, Sketch of biogeochemical interactions when the Earth’s layers are seen in reverse, 2019. Visualization. The movements of the atmosphere are in the center of the drawing and around them is the transformation of the rocks.

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The Terra Incognita under Our Feet

DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE of the Critical Zone for humanity, major questions are still unanswered. First of all, the Critical Zone is a “terra incognita” whose architecture is poorly understood. Beyond the conventional layered textbook representations defining the soil, the regolith,7 the ecosystem, the water table, the river, and so on, we lack conceptual representations showing the interconnections between these compartments which the different disciplines have erected and frozen as objects of study. Numerical models that tend to reproduce and predict the behavior of the Critical Zone are hampered by this lack of knowledge of its boundaries, and of the spatial and temporal connections of the object that sustains human activities and feeds us. Very simple questions arise: What is the depth of the Critical Zone? What are its lower (towards the center of the Earth) and higher (towards Earth’s upper atmosphere) limits? What are the living organisms that populate it, to what depth do they live, and where do they find their energy? What are the essential interfaces and main water flow paths? How does geologic legacy determine the shape and functioning of the Critical Zone over thousands to millions of years of topographic change, rock fracturing, and controls on the nature of rocks? Conversely, over time, does the Critical Zone “learn” to no longer depend on geologic and climatic initial conditions, but to strike out along trajectories controlled by and for life, as Lovelock suggests? What is the inventory of the processes that animate the Critical Zone? What do we know about the multiplicity of coupling mechanisms in this “functional biogeodiversity” of the Critical Zone which, by connecting the different compartments — soil, water, minerals, air, living organisms — are responsible for the ways in which it responds to perturbations of variable amplitude and temporalities? It is known that trees communicate with each other, so what about all the other agents in the critical soils — water, bacteria, clays, and carbon dioxide? How does a soil destroyed, for example, by the action of too intensive agriculture “remember” how to implement chemical reactions that can

restore it? What is the rate of formation of a cultivable soil and what controls it? How long does the rainwater that infiltrates and the pollutants that humans introduce reside in the Critical Zone? These are the questions, both academic and operational, that remain unanswered, but which should condition the way we coexist with this object, which is also our habitat (see fig. 6). Critical Zone Observatories

TO MEET THESE CHALLENGES, scientists are getting organized. Following the initiative of the United States of America, Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs, or networks of Critical Zone Observatories) have been set up in various countries. A global network is being developed. These observatories are well-chosen sites, locations that are heavily instrumented and monitored over sufficiently long periods of time so that processes and fluxes in the Critical Zone can be identified, described, and incorporated into numerical models. Only observation over long time periods makes it possible to capture the different kinetics — temporalities — of the Critical Zone, of extreme events as well as slow trends. CZOs are agrosystems, cultivated or relatively preserved forests, cities, high mountain catchments, instrumented wells, or glaciers. The measurements made in CZOs, either in situ (in the field) or on samples analyzed in the laboratory, are adapted to the processes that are locally best expressed. The instruments are often very sophisticated, whether they are installed directly in the field or in the research laboratories attached to these CZOs. For example, the use of isotopic ratios to track the route of chemical elements in the Critical Zone and the processes in which they are involved (clay precipitation, evaporation, uptake of nutrients by roots, etc.), or the deployment of passive or induced geophysical methods, such as the seismic imaging of gravels transported at the bottom of streams, are widely used by Critical Zone scientists. Each CZO is a place, a plot, a hillslope, a catchment, characterized by a unique, simply formulated scientific question, which is often of societal interest and for which the place has been chosen as representative. There is a Critical Zone, perceived as a new scientific object, but there are Critical Zone Observatories,

7 See Clifford S. Riebe, W. Jesse Hahm, and Susan L. Brantley, “Controls on deep critical zone architecture: A historical review and four testable hypotheses,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 42, no. 1 (2017): 128–56.

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Fig. 6: Alexandra Arènes, Series of terraforming processes: chemical and physical weathering and erosion, solar radiation, melting of ice and sea currents, droughts and floods, carbon extraction and emission, sediment accumulation, plate tectonics and volcanism, 2019. Visualization.

all different in their combination of different parameters: geology, climate, topography, soil, living organisms, human activities, its history, or the conflicts of land use. For example, a CZO can be designated to understand the response of the Critical Zone to the increasing (or decreasing) acidity of rain, the generation of destructive flood events, the response time of an agrosystem to changes in agricultural practices, the retreat of a glacier, or the role of climate change in Amazon floods. The main characteristic of a CZO is that it is site-specific; that is, determined by local conditions, and chosen to exemplify a particular type of mechanism to be understood at a particular scale. Elementary processes are discernible at the scale of a small river basin. At the scale of a region, such as the drainage area of the entire Amazon River, other processes emerge that require observations and modelling tools different from those required at the scale of a small river or a parcel of land. In CZOs or networks of CZOs, ideally scientists from different backgrounds and speaking different languages work together to understand the object in an integrated way. They do it by sharing instruments, data, and numerical models. The beauty of this integration has allowed some CZOs to attract scientists from the human and social sciences, while some are working more and more with local stakeholders, users, and citizens. One of the hopes of the global network of CZOs is to develop a set of common metrics that can be applied everywhere according to the scale of observation to build standardized and interoperable common databases informed by common metadata. These data will describe characteristic processes at each scale, and will inform numerical models that will improve our ability to predict the evolution of the Critical Zone in response to climatic, anthropogenic, or geologic forcing. Thus to study the Critical Zone, scientists study critical places, as Alexander von Humboldt had already understood when he wrote in his famous book Cosmos (1845–62) that “every where,

in every separate portion of the earth, nature is indeed only a reflex of the whole.” 8 Every corner of the globe, every CZO, is an instrumented natural laboratory, in which the processes and pulsations that characterize the Critical Zone are identified. The conceptual view that describes CZOs not as static objects structured into different subentities, but as animated by biogeochemical cycles is particularly new and relevant: CZOs manifest the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the phosphorus cycle, or the cycle of rare earth elements, and are offering a new perspective on habitats. In the same way that the CZOs provide information to paint the picture of the Critical Zone, each chemical element or molecule provides its own systemic image of the Critical Zone without caring about the divisions between subcompartments. In this biogeochemical approach, the biological nature of the organism is less central than the chemical or physical reactions that they render possible. There is a significant difference here between the concepts of a Critical Zone introduced by Earth scientists and that of ecosystem, introduced by ecologists — at least in the historical meaning of the term “ecosystem.” Living organisms participate in the formation and evolution of a biogeochemical system that we must learn to name and represent better. Their biodiversity is important because it conditions the physical, chemical, and biological reactions in the Critical Zone (see figs. 7 and 8). Our Territories Are “Critical Zones”

THE CONCEPT of a Critical Zone does not set up an opposition between humans and nature or between living and non-living states. It refers to a system, which we still have difficulty naming and representing that is anchored locally, and orchestrated by biogeochemical cycles in which living organisms including humans are agents, among others. The sun’s energy animates these cycles, but they would not exist without the action 8 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the World, vol. 2, trans. Elise C. Otté (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866), 95. Originally published in German as Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: J. Cotta, 1847).

THE CRITICAL ZONE, A BUFFER ZONE, THE HUMAN HABITAT

6

Fig. 7: Alexandra Arènes, Functional diagram of a generic watershed equipped with instruments from each discipline studying the Critical Zone, 2019. Visualization.

7

Fig. 8: Alexandra Arènes, Axonometric view showing the role of the sun in a dynamic hydrological and geochemical perspective, 2019. Visualization. Matter and elements are activated by a cosmo-tectonic circulation denoted here as the “energetic maelstrom.” The Critical Zone is both geocentric and heliocentric.

of plate tectonics, ultimately a result of the secular cooling of our planet. The concept of a Critical Zone is restoring importance to local heterogeneity and deep time (as opposed to global and short times, described by Earth System Models aimed at predicting the next century). It inaugurates, with modern tools of scientific investigation, a new way of understanding human territories and their relationship to nature. These territories are ultimately “Critical Zones” for human activity. By giving geology a central place in what conditions our existence on the planet, the critical concept reintroduces slow- and long-term evolution, ultimately manifested in the vertical dimension of depth beyond the cultivable soil or canopy, and encourages a certain humility in humanity by confronting it with the temporal and spatial

THE CRITICAL ZONE, A BUFFER ZONE, THE HUMAN HABITAT

scales that shape its habitat. The Critical Zone is fragile, endangered by often brutal and senseless human actions, and requires more than ever before to be understood through observation over long periods of time utilizing sophisticated and systematic instrumentation. Our fragile but fertile Earth’s skin is sick, and it must be better understood. Research institutions and funding agencies prefer to encourage competition between scientists rather than collaboration, but for our future on the planet, it is collaboration and powerful infrastructures that scientists need. There is no longer any doubt that it is in understanding biogeochemical cycles at the territorial scale (so nicely illustrated by the term “territorial metabolism”) that the solution to the sustainability issue of our species on the planet rests.

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B

A

Traveling through the Critical Zone

1 The village of Aubure lies at an altitude between 800 and 900 meters. 2 The scientists call this “a budget.”

Alexandra Arènes INTRODUCTION. WATERSHEDS. Foxgloves, bark beetles, acid rain. The forest is toxic and yet very quiet. During the walk, there are troubling patches: clumps of foxgloves — lethal flowers — in the clearings, a tree stripped bare here, a whole stretch of dead forest, dry and earth-colored there (see fig. A). It’s very hot on this July day. The 30°C bar was crossed last week. Yet, the village of Aubure, near the monitored forest with its instrumentation, is one of the highest villages in France,1 nestling in the Ballons des Vosges, a dense forest, “black” like its German counterpart a few miles away; a forest of shade with harsh winters. Two days before, Marie-Claire (see Pierret, this volume, xxx–xxx) took us with her on her tour of the site, which consists in gathering the measurements made at each of the stations — that is to say, the places with instrumentation — in the catchment basin. The first station is the meteorological one. A Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) is first and foremost about calculating the quantity (of water and elements) which enters, minus what exits from the system, and 120

hence everything that happens in between.2 The — often discreet — machines that register the meteorological station is the entry point of the pulsations and dynamics of the Critical Zone. system, the high point from which to deduce the Thus, a CZO is never obvious as such; it is alother measurements, the registration of all the ways a host of distributed instruments that enparameters that heat, cool, feed, ventilate, hu- able us to recognize it (see fig. B). As we shall see, midify, and recharge the catchment basin and these tools provide a new understanding of nawhich, in the case of the Strengbach CZO, enable ture. There is no river, there are levels of wetthe scientists to follow the evolution of the im- ness, clouds, molecules, and chemistry. There is pact of acid rain. no ground, there is water around grains of sand. A catchment basin is a geographical unit What is this new understanding of nature that that receives a quantity of water and runs it off substitutes the Critical Zone for the classical from its hillsides or slopes into a common outlet. notion of landscape? What are the tools, methDrainage divides mark the limits between catch- ods, techniques, and practices required to proment basins. A catchment basin isn’t a legal enti- duce the sciences of the Critical Zone? In what ty or an administrative territory, but a geologi- way does this enable us to better understand the cal entity in which water circulates, sometimes Earth and our way of inhabiting it? at depth, in a particular way. Their size, morphological characteristics, and occupancy of land may be variable, but a catchment basin is recognizable as such because it is a sort of receptacle for water, and is, therefore, in that sense, the living ground of the beings it irrigates. A watershed becomes a CZO when it is equipped with

C

D

E

FIGS: A— The Strengbach forest, 2019. B— Alexandra Arènes, Map of the Strengbach CZO, 2019. Visualization. C— Soheil Hajmirbaba, The meteorological station at the Strengbach CZO, 2019. Drawing. D — The station of damaged spruces, 2019. E— Sulfur chronicles. Variations/decrease of sulfate (SO42-) concentrations since 1986 in the stream at the outlet and in spring (drinking water) at the Strengbach catchment.

Story 1: Trees

MAR I E - CLAI R E records the temperature variations printed by an automatic arm on the graph paper. It has been unusually hot for a moderate-altitude mountainous environment. She adds that this doesn’t mean the winters are less harsh: it is just as cold, but there is more rain, at the expense of snow cover. Yet, groundwater tables are recharged thanks to snow cover here. Marie-Claire is worried about the drinking water supply for the village — and for the thousands of other villages in France and towns worldwide. This is one of the research issues here, as local as it is global. Marie-Claire goes round the various instruments in the enclosure, which is protected from animals and humans (see fig. C). She picks up the water bags, but there are just a few drops in them; it isn’t worth noting the quantity. We carry on with her round. A few meters from there, there’s the spruce station. Large horizontal metal trays perched on slender legs are set up among the trees. Marie-Claire explains that these

big steel rays, perched on their precarious vertical legs, harvest the rainwater that has fallen on the branches and needles of the pine trees (the “throughfall” (see fig. D)). In the lab, her team compares the chemical composition of the rainwater that has escaped contact with the trees with the water that has run off the leaves. The aim is to understand how the water is transformed on contact with the trees: Do the trees effect a reduction of the acidity of the rain that results from industry releasing sulfuric acid into the atmosphere? Do they manage to produce more nutrients than they lose? Scientists, answer these questions and make some disturbing findings: on the one hand, the anthropic emissions of sulfur from Asia that cause acid rain are transported to the site in twenty days under certain climatic conditions; on the other hand, thanks to other “good” wind conditions, the nutrients feeding the Vosges forest are brought in with the sand from the great deserts (for example, the Sahara). I notice something strange at the station and exclaim: “You measure the rainwater beneath the canopy,

but the trees around the gutters are dead!” Marie-Claire explains that these gutters have been there for some ten years or so, but that an epidemic of bark beetles — Scolytinae — a common parasite in our latitudes, but one whose life cycle has speeded up with global warming, is developing, and virulently attacking the trees. Particularly as these trees are already fragile due to the acidity of the soils and the increasingly long and frequent drought episodes. The soil acidity is not only a product of acid rain, which has in fact decreased since the 1980s although its effects are still felt (see fig. E), it is also due to the very nature of the spruce trees whose acidic needles carpet the soil with a cover that promotes acidity. The spruce trees are trapped in this mortuary bed, a dramatic situation maintained by the industrial forestry activity that continues to plant spruce in order to fell and sell them. The gutters await in the void, perched on their sloping ground facing the mountain, as if suspended in the sky. A mist hangs over the watershed this morning and heightens our feeling of vertigo. 121

F

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Story 2: Water

WE MOVE TO another instrumented spot. Marie-Claire measures the flow and temperature of the four springs of the watershed. In summer, the temperature difference between the springs is significant, since some flow out at the surface and hence are heated by the sun, whereas others are protected in the depths of the Critical Zone. In the spring there is almost no temperature gap. I learn from several other interviews that water has different ages. Some waters are termed “fossil” because they remain stuck deep in the rocks for hundreds of years. On average, a drop of water remains in the Strengbach catchment for 30 months before coming out again, but this varies from one observatory and one part of the world to another. In Guadeloupe, scientists suspect that infiltrated water stays much longer. So researchers are creating models to understand the water pathways. To do so, they need to know the precise composition of the Critical Zone and therefore to travel directly to the field. 122

Extract from the field visit, Guadeloupe CZO, Bras-David river (see fig. F): Rainforest: indeed, it is pouring rain. The space here is water particles: the water is not only in the flow of the stream we climb, where we slide and end up being totally wet, but also in the pores of the ground, the water is also in the heavy air, as the trees breathe loudly around us. Jérôme reminds me of the explorer Humboldt; he moves rapidly through the jungle. He and his team make rough drawings out in the field, note the location of a place of interest. This is a kind of exploration, but not in extension, to discover new lands (since there is no longer a square meter of Earth’s surface that is unknown), but an exploration to discover the intensity of the changes, reaction, and movement of the Earth. It is all about registering small intensities occurring on the surface (an eroded rock,

H

water with a high ion content) that are “echoes” of major (biogeochemical or hydrological) cycles. The scientists are therefore not mapping places but points of transformation.3 Water flow paths are among the most challenging features of the Critical Zone to observe, model, and understand. Yet this is crucial for the management of our water supplies. Water paths follow currents, as in the ocean, depending on the porosity of the Critical Zone: the surface layer of the Critical Zone (commonly called the soil and containing organic matter) is averagely porous, that is to say, it allows a middling amount of water to pass; the trees are very porous, the air even more so, while rock has low porosity, but can be fractured — that is to say, split from the inside by a continuous flow of a stream of water that alters the chemistry of the rock and reduces its density. Water can also be captured in pockets or come out suddenly through “macropores,” which are a kind of tube,

I

F— Alexandra Arènes, Sketch of the cycles in the CZO Bras-David, Guadeloupe, 2019. G— Geophysics campaign, Seismic characterization of the Strengbach catchment, August 2019. H— Sylvain Pasquet, Seismic velocity profiles in the Strengbach catchment, 2019. Visualization. I— Jérôme Gaillardet, Sketch of the water paths and knickpoint in the CZO Bras-David, Guadeloupe, 2019. Drawing.

opened up by mammalian activity or the decomposition of a root. We are, however, blind to these depths unless geophysics and geochemistry afford us a glimpse of what is going on beneath our feet. Geophysics allows us to visualize the location of the porous regions (see fig. G), while geochemistry provides hypotheses on these trajectories by studying the chemical composition of the spring water or the water collated at depth by the piezometers. If the water pathways are so important to discover, this is because the water carries chemical elements. Driven by solar energy, the water activates the cycles of the biogeochemical elements that end up transforming landscapes. The surface is easier to understand. At depth, however, the Critical Zone is much more complicated; in this case, the images are simplified and are forced, in a way, to synthetize the features; such as these colorful transects that Sylvain showed me at the IPGP which render the porosity of the soil (see fig. H). By contrast, geochemistry is an exercise in acupuncture. Essentially, the idea is to multiply

several measurement points (the more differences there are, the better the data), as I learned by exploring the rivers with the team that measured conductivity upstream and downstream, in order to choose the river to study that offers the most contrasting measurements (before/after knickpoint4 (see fig. I)). The differences and heterogeneity enable them to see better what is happening beyond the reach of sight. They register the variations, the alteration, the erosion. It is these processes that actually give the Earth its heterogeneity by constantly modifying the chemical composition of the planet. Instruments enable the scientists to plot the variability of the natural elements. By taking small extractions from what they call the different “compartments,” they isolate micro-events that generate changes. By extracting a leaf or taking a sample of water, they can isolate a molecule and trace the sulfur cycle; by generating a wave in the ground, they can observe a vibration and reconstitute the depths of the Critical Zone. By noting and tracing these small events, they

deconstruct a monolithic vision of the landscape. The landscape is not a space to be filled, nor inert matter that can be shaped at will, but a volume of phenomena, entities, movements, and reactions: with cycles that animate it. The sciences of the Critical Zone shift the anthropocentric view of nature as a background to human actions, and restore the complexity of what constitutes a territory, of the entities that compose it, element by element. The landscape has quite another “shape,” composition, granulometry, and dynamic. The instruments, sensors, and tools recompose “nature,” pixel by pixel, across the cycles and the connections between agents. By cross-checking data, ordering micro-events, the scientists see all the disturbances, sometimes even micro-changes, that would not be perceptible on a human time scale or with the naked eye, but which nevertheless generate a virulent reaction within the system.

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5 See the contributions by the OHGE scientists in this volume; Pierret, xxx–xxx; and Gaillardet, xxx–xxx. 6 Nils Ole Bubandt and Anna Tsing, “An Ethnoecology for the Anthropocene: How A Former Brown-coal Mine in Denmark Shows Us the Feral Dynamics of Post-industrial Ruin,” Journal of Ethnobiology 38, no. 1 (2018): 1–13, here 8. 7 Cosmogram, in the sense developed by John Tresch, “Cosmogram,” in Cosmogram, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 67–76. 8 This visualization has been described in Alexandra Arènes, Bruno Latour, and Jérôme Gaillardet, “Giving depth to the surface: An exercise in the Gaia-graphy of critical zones,” The Anthropocene Review 5, no. 2 (2018): 120–35.

Story 3: Cosmograms

HOWEVER , why should we be interested in such unremarkable sites? It isn’t here that the glaciers are melting, the forests burning, or emblematic species of wild fauna going extinct. No, these aren’t hotspots of the global crisis. The CZOs are, above all, places of life, a nearby territory that is dying slowly and discreetly. We also need those scientists who look carefully at the environments closest to us. For Solenn, the challenge is to amplify the site — that is to say, to collect different measurements, since everything interacts and moves without regard to boundaries. The CZOs are special because they are inhabited — and have been for many years — and because issues have emerged from concerns that relate to both human and nonhuman assemblages, bonds that maintain the ecology of a site.5 The CZOs enable us “to notice the complicity at stake in the political ecology of humans and nonhumans,”6 as Tsing and Bubandt say. This is what can be described as cosmopolitical, those 124

unheralded actions that nevertheless constitute the most mundane and ordinary territories all over the world. WE GO A BIT FURTHER down the Strengbach and come to the Riverlab. The Riverlab is a prototype in situ laboratory, sheltered inside a container and located on the river bank (see fig. J). It measures various river parameters continuously: its chemistry, physical properties, and sediments (see fig. K). These continuous measurements have uncovered significant and irregular chemical oscillations between day and night, particularly during heat waves, to the point that researchers call these phenomena a “nychthemeral concert” (see fig. L). In the Strengbach, we find a different tune. The river is very heavy with sediment, particles of matter that obstruct the instruments that have been placed in the river to take measurements and send water into the Riverlab. The river doesn’t make itself easy to monitor. We go into the Riverlab. The researchers set the machine going. It spits, groans, and begins

to work. The pressure is too high and it chokes. After renewed attempts and by letting the coughing water tap run for several minutes, the measuring screen at last turns green. The noise and agitation are astonishing and contrast sharply with the other spots where we took measurements manually, calmly, and in silence. Bringing a fully equipped laboratory onto the site was not without its problems, both human and technical. However, when Jérôme and Paul explain to me how Riverlab works, I can glimpse the potential that is there. It is a kind of temporal chemical microscope that enables us to see all the variations of the river: seasonal variations, diurnal and nocturnal variations, one-off variations (floods). All these have different physical and chemical characteristics. To see them in real time is a major advance. These are the minute-by-minute rhythms, the pulsations of the water that runs through the heart of the Critical Zone and transforms it. Inside the Riverlab, however, the water is never visible as such. It is what there is inside it — its particles, its molecules — that appears on the

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J— Interior of the Riverlab, CZO Strengbach, 2019. K— Alexandra Arènes, Scheme of the Riverlab data acquisition, 2019. Visualization. L— The geochemical matrix or the orchestra of the elements in the river of the Orgeval CZO. Each color represents a flooding event. M— Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images of a soil sample from a spruce plot in the Strengbach watershed. The different colors correspond to the areas of concentration of different elements

graphs in the form of waves which the scientists know how to interpret. To me, it is pipes, valves, taps, test-tubes, and a computer. Yet I can see that the Riverlab is a true cosmogram7 that takes us right into the Critical Zone. On the last day, I have a meeting at the laboratory of the Hydro-Geochemical Observatory of the Environment (Observatoire Hydro-Géochimique de l’Environnement, OHGE) in Strasbourg. Extracts and samples from the observatory fill the basement of the building: these are the biological and geological archives, including the rock cores drilled to a depth of 120 meters during the installation of the piezometers. The tubular rock cores, extracted by boring, are laid out in large cabinets and labeled with their depth of extraction. This is a dive into the depths, but horizontally this time! We pass through the ages and the strata, we follow the faults — those fractures where water circulates in the granite, although that rock isn’t porous to water — which complexify the understanding of the Critical Zone at depth. Naturally, at these depths,

we must not think of clear, free-running water: as Jérôme reminded us, water is wet grains. Other cabinets contain surface rocks, bags of branches and bags of leaves, a fridge full of water samples, and shelves loaded with soil samples. There are also microscopic images of sediments, showing traces of organic and mineral material. The Strengbach CZO is there, too, its natural history is there, but it is not preserved as in a museum; it is consulted and archived here only because the aim is not to freeze the site in time, but to understand how it changes. We climb the floors of the building. All trace of naturalistic materiality has disappeared here. The flasks of soil, organic matter, water, and rock are digitized, then converted into light rays (see fig. M). The Strengbach takes on quite another form. The geophysics maps are drawn up from the propagation of seismic waves or electromagnetic signals. There is the animated map of the recharging of the spring, the map of the surface water runoff, the map of electrical resistivity, and the map of porosities across the whole of the

(yellow: titanium, violet: iron, blue: potassium, green: silica, red: sodium) N— Alexandra Arènes, template for the visualization of the Critical Zone, 2019.

watershed. The raw digital data do not give an image. The world is made up in this way of contrasts that one may choose to ignore or accentuate. The combination of these measurements is represented figuratively, particularly because geophysics is linked to the spatialization of data. This is not quite the case with geochemistry, which follows changes through trajectories, that is to say, the trace of an element surveyed in the Critical Zone. However, on my excursions into the Critical Zone, I have never seen a suitable solution for mapping the biogeochemical cycles. Therefore, we have begun to develop a visualization tool to map the processes of the Critical Zone (see fig. N).8

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The Strengbach Catchment Environmental Observatory: A Needful Key for a Global Investigation of the Critical Zone Marie-Claire Pierret LONG-TERM OBSERVATIONS remain the only way to quantify and characterize the perturbations of the Earth induced by human activities, and to accept that humanity has now entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. THE HYDRO - GEOCHEMICAL Observatory of the Environment (Observatoire Hydro-Géochimique de l’Environnement, OHGE) of the School and Observatory of Earth Sciences (EOST) in Strasbourg documents the anthropogenic effects on the Critical Zone through long-term observations, abundant interdisciplinary research, and strong involvement in training and communication activities. The OHGE’s site is located in the small-scale water catchment (80 ha) of the Strengbach river in the Vosges Mountains (880–1150 m elevation) in Eastern France where multidisciplinary projects and research have been conducted since 1985, exploring all the compartments of the Critical Zone, from the scale of atoms to the scale of satellite observations, from the scale of instantaneous mechanisms to several thousand processes. 126

This “open sky laboratory” and monitoring site is situated in the commune of Aubure, a small village where the economic activity is mainly agriculture, forest management, and tourism. The village inhabitants are particularly dependent on environment conservation as all their drinking water is supplied by mountain springs, some of which are located in the studied site. Long-term observations allow the detection of modifications of biological, physical, and chemical variables such as precipitation, temperature, river flow rate, concentration of chemicals in soil water and river water, air contaminants, or vegetation growth. The changes in these variables are the consequences of several perturbations occurring concurrently with different intensities, which generate answering processes with different characteristic times (from seconds for flooding to several hundred thousand years for erosion). These mechanisms have to be described and understood in order to develop mathematical models capable of reproducing the observations, of

predicting the evolution of the system in the near and distant future, and then attempting to conserve, protect, and preserve the water and soil resources. Therefore, the OHGE is the meeting point of many scientific disciplines involved in the geosciences (hydrology, geochemistry, geophysics), life sciences (microbiology, plant biology, plant physiology), informatics and mathematics (database management, mathematical and numerical modelling), and social sciences (history, sociology, education). The mixing and collaboration between wide varieties of scientific disciplines is the only way to investigate globally the (past, present, and future) Critical Zone. Training of MA and PhD students and communicating research findings to a large audience are important activities of the OHGE since it addresses in a very timely fashion societal challenges such as (I) water resource availability and sustainability in mountainous environments in the context of climate and precipitation regime changes and (II) forest health and future evolution of

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FIGS: A|D— Series of diagrams showing

the steps in the construction of the alternative visualization of the Critical Zone by Alexandra Arènes. A1|4— Giving depth to the Critical Zone, from a global view to a Critical Zone view. These diagrams present an alternative visualization of the Earth by reversing its layers like a glove turned inside out. The core is now at the edges and the Critical Zone is now at the center: the weathered layers, where the rocks are trans-

soil fertility in an era when economic pressure on wood production and supply is growing. The site location was studied and selected on account of different parameters such as the geomorphology, the geology, the presence of a large proportion of forest and a small river, as well as a positive and supportive local commune. This was the situation in Aubure in 1985 with a Green mayor involved and concerned by forest dieback, who offered his support to the observatory project. Since then, scientific and technical OHGE teams visit the site on average once a week, sometimes with field campaigns lasting five or even ten days, and they are also actively linked to village associations and institutions by holding regular events. In this way links have developed between the observatory’s team and the inhabitants of the village. The OHGE scientists have also developed ties with the municipal council and local people because they share the same questions and issues — all wish for a better understanding of the possible evolution of the ecosystem. The future of the forest

and the available water is a crucial question for the development and sustainability of the village. Actually, this is a two-way connection: the inhabitants of Aubure have special knowledge about traditional land use and its resources and about past extreme events (e.g., mud flow, severe storms, exceptional climatic perturbations), which can affect the present-day parameters, and the OHGE teams are potentially a source of knowledge, expertise, and cultural or social vitality, as well as being an attractive advertisement for the village. For example, events concerning the OHGE are regularly reported in the local media. The OHGE also organized a science festival in Aubure for children and the general public, with several workshops and a scientific tour of the different stations of the observatory and also offered public presentations of the results achieved. Further, the OHGE teams are part of events organized by the local festivities committee such as the “Gourmet Walk.” When new large-scale equipment is installed on the site, the OHGE usually proposes an official opening

formed into soft soil, with the atmosphere in the middle. B— Cartographic system of the Critical Zone view: to describe a place through its reservoirs and depths, and to locate a space through the movement of the cycles that shape this place, made visible by a series of spirals.

with local institutions and organizations to explain and describe the devices. In addition, the OHGE interacts with the National Forests Office (Office national des forêts, ONF) concerning the health and future of the various tree plots and the scientists meet regularly in the field. They also participate together in the International Day of the Forest by organizing hikes through the site for the public, describing the forest plots, the forestry management, the equipment, and the scientific problems we are working on, or by planting trees or listening to poetry. Common projects to preserve the fertility of soils and the health of the forest are planned for the future. In addition, the field campaign is scheduled to respect the hunting season and the squall of the deer. During field work the OHGE scientists stay in village accommodation and support the social bonding in rural areas by buying food at the local grocery store. This makes the OHGE team feel they belong to the village of Aubure and are involved in its development. 127

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THE SUCCESS and the longevity of the observation of this site are due to the combination of several factors, mainly: (I) the ability to develop connections and relations between researchers, policy makers, and associations; (II) the motivation and investment of the successive researchers responsible for the site to form an alliance with and welcome international scientists; and (III) the continuous funding and support from the Institut national des sciences de l’Univers (INSU) [National Institute of the Sciences of the Universe] and the French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS). The Strengbach catchment site was chosen because it was affected by severe forest decline, like many places around the world in the 1970s. Hydrologic, meteorological, and geochemical parameters, as for instance precipitation under and outside the canopy, air temperatures, river discharge, concentrations of minerals and chemicals in springs and in the river, have been continuously recorded since 1985. It is therefore one 128

of the oldest sites on granitic basement in the world to be monitored continuously. During the past 35 years, several anthropogenic perturbations have been identified and studied. One emblematic example is the evolution of acid rain due to sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides gaseous emissions during fossil energy combustion. Some political decisions and clean air acts were enacted in 1980s in North America and Europe, implying a significant decrease of emission. At the scale of the Strengbach catchment, far away from the direct sources of pollutants, the sulfur atmospheric deposits decreased from 2t/yr to less than 200kg/yr currently, followed by a significant decrease in the river water concentrations, which highlights the potential recovery or resilience of this natural system. Another representative result is the impact of tree species on the biogeochemical cycle of nutrients at the soil scale. Higher acidification and leaching under spruces were observed, which result in higher impacts on and threats to soil fertility, and has implications for the sustainability

of the spruce plantations, which represent 80 percent of the managed forest. Climate changes in temperature and pluviometry have also been observed, with a global warming of about 1°C in 30 years, and a global increase of average precipitation. However, the distribution differs with the season, with a higher increase of temperature in spring and a higher increase of precipitation in fall and winter. Very importantly, we learned that interdisciplinary research is mandatory to enrich one’s own discipline, but it needs time to cultivate colleagues from other disciplines, that is, to understand their vocabulary and to build trust. Time is needed to develop humility and trust in the partners’ words. Humility, because we need to recognize that our own discipline is not “better” than that of others, that we need the support of other disciplines or, even “worse,” that our discipline is not the most appropriate to improve our knowledge about the issue at hand. Time has to be dedicated to numerous discussions and exchanges between partners and, of

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C— Alternative visualization of the terres-

trial cycle of sulfur, without human influence (natural cycle) and with human influence (human cycle). The Critical Zone view shows how human activity perturbs a cycle. Drawn with the help of Jérôme Gaillardet. D— Alternative visualization of the terrestrial cycle of sulfur at the scale of the

course, depends on the type of relationship between the partners. One of the main difficulties in promoting interdisciplinarity is the evaluation of the scientific work. In science, evaluation is mainly performed by counting the number of papers published in high-ranking international journals. Publishing extensively means that the scientist must dedicate a lot of time to writing and, therefore, is likely to devote less time to discussions with colleagues from other disciplines. Peer-reviewed international journals very often specialize in a single discipline. Most of the interdisciplinary journals are, unfortunately, less prestigious. Therefore, young scientists not involved in interdisciplinary research face a contradiction: their research will benefit from interdisciplinary work but not their career. However, interdisciplinarity is made easier when researchers work on the same object, with questions they share. The study of the Critical Zone is, of course, a good candidate for this. This is why the multidisciplinary research on the observatories of the OHGE has developed quite

naturally for decades. Moreover, its long and unusual data series, its many already existing facilities, and the broad knowledge already acquired makes it particularly attractive scientifically. We have also learned that regular contacts with a wide audience are a real source of personal and scientific enrichment. These good relationships, sometimes even friendships, that we developed with the local population, are also essential for different reasons: (I) scientists are “only” the guests and the visitors of the site; (II) the different visitors of the forest (e.g., hikers, hunters, loggers, inhabitants, scientists) have to develop their own activities in peace, freedom, and respect; (III) we have so much to learn from each other and so much to exchange; and (IV) the protection of the Earth, our most precious common possession, is easier to understand and to be involved in, via local challenges, with territorial issues.

Strengbach CZO, for the year 1986/87 and then 2016–18, showing the impact of the sulfur cycle on a local observatory. Drawn with the help of Marie-Claire Pierret.

sustainability of springs, the development of wood parasites leading to tree mortality, and modification of forest management for nonadapted tree species. Ongoing research at the OHGE is based on the interlinked geophysical, hydrological, biological, and geochemical investigations to better understand and model the past, present, and future functioning of the watershed with regard to water resources, forest health, and soil fertility. The development of such Critical Zone Observatories around the world in a variety of geological, climatic, and anthropic contexts is one of the key responses to evaluate, calculate, model, imagine, and protect the future evolution of the Earth during the Anthropocene, and then the future way to inhabit the Earth.

THE IMPLICATIONS of the water storage dynamic, hydric stress, and forest health are significant, with, for instance, concerns about the 129

The Critical Zone Paradigm – A Personal View Susan L. Brantley IN MANY COUNTR IES, if a doctor doesn’t focus on problems of a specific body part such as the heart, or a specific patient type such as children, or doesn’t learn techniques of surgery or some other specialty, we call them a general practitioner (GP). These GPs observe the entire patient and consult on health issues holistically. In Earth surface science before 2004, we didn’t have many GPs. That’s why many of us pushed to create a new type of scientific GP. We created Critical Zone Science to focus on studying the Earth’s surface — from air to trees to water to rocks to humans. I am a geochemist and I was heavily involved with the birth of Critical Zone Science, but I am not sure exactly why it happened. Some of it was that geochemists were tired of studying smaller and smaller pieces of a system and watching opportunities go to other geoscientists. But my own trajectory toward Critical Zone Science actually began in my graduate work in geology. I began measuring the rates of reactions between water and rocks. But I became unsatisfied because I could not use the measured 130

rates to predict what was happening in natural hillslopes and watersheds. When we estimated rates of reactions in nature, we discovered they were always slower, sometimes almost a million times slower, than our measured lab rates. Many people puzzled over this. We considered everything from biological effects (do trees slow down reactions between water and rock?) to the effect of time (does a rock react slower and slower over geological time?) to the effect of humans (had we perturbed natural systems?). All of these aspects of the natural system affect the rates that rocks interact with water. Eventually scientists discovered that where the reactions occur together simultaneously in nature, one reaction can slow another down. When we measured isolated minerals separate from others in the laboratory in my experiments, we simply missed what happens in nature where multiple minerals react together. One scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who was way ahead of me in his thinking, Arthur F. White, was deciphering the rates of

mineral-water reactions in field systems. He taught me how to read the rates of reactions in soil layers. We started learning from others how to use computers to simulate the reactions. These computer models helped us realize that we needed to cease studying one isolated mineral reaction at a time, but instead to study each field site in its entirety. This, of course, was difficult, and meant we had to engage a lot of researchers who could help us study the trees at the same time that we needed others to study the bacteria, and others to study the water flow … and the atmospheric deposition … and the worms … all the things we didn’t know much about because of our own training histories. At that time, however, scientists from the different environmental disciplines competed harshly against one another for funding, sometimes denigrating each other’s science to push forward their own field. Clearly, we needed to put the whole scientific target back in focus to fight together. We called this new idea something slightly funny in retrospect — “weathering

system science.” We didn’t get anywhere because only we thought that sounded interesting. Then once again we realized we needed to emphasize the “thing” we wanted to study rather than one isolated process. We grabbed a term that a prescient sedimentologist, Gail Ashley, had coined a few years earlier: the Critical Zone. We finally realized that what we had to do was put the Critical Zone back together and study it as one integral entity: how it works, how the different pieces interrelate, as well as how it evolves over time. We didn’t fully grasp until later how the idea of the Critical Zone would captivate students and researchers around the world. It was a deeply popular idea that engaged not only scientists but also nonscientists. We had discovered a hunger to stop reducing systems to small pieces of the puzzle and instead to put the puzzle pieces back together into one integrated picture. Soon we had educated students who could work across all the subdisciplines much better than we could. We laughed and tried to figure out what to call them — C-zologists?

C-zologists defined the Critical Zone to range the pendulum swung, and the USA decided to from the top of vegetation to the bottom of stop funding CZOs. The biggest scientific agengroundwater. Instead of fighting to fund work cy that had funded Critical Zone Science from its separately as geochemists or ecologists or soil inception began to encourage their scientists to scientists or hydrologists or geophysicists, we again focus only on a few isolated aspects of the worked collaboratively side by side. And slow- Critical Zone. ly the Critical Zone started to reveal itself to But, we still need to understand the whole us. Geologists learned how trees shared nutri- system, not just the isolated parts, and Euents underground with fungi, while soil scien- rope and China and other parts of the world tists learned how the layers in rocks influence are growing observatories to continue to train the thickness of a soil. By looking at the Criti- C-zologists to integrate measurements and modcal Zone over short and long timescales, we be- els to cross the interface between rocks and life gan building models that we now find useful in — including humans. Like any vibrant area of projecting — “earthcasting” — these systems research, we don’t know what will happen next into the future. in C-zology. But the students are now working The attractiveness of the holistic nature of around the globe. They are hungry to underCritical Zone Science led to the growth of Criti- stand the Critical Zone in ways we could not cal Zone Observatories (CZOs) in country after even imagine just a few years ago. The USA may country. But, just as general practitioners don’t have started Critical Zone Science but, luckily, always command the respect of a specialist in the whole world is now moving it forward. surgery, C-zologists found themselves under attack. I suppose this was inevitable. In the USA the pushback was stubbornly fierce. Predictably, 131

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Ansichten der Calzone: Views of the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory Daniel D. Richter, Sharon A. Billings The German title of our piece follows Alexander von Humboldt, to honor his 250th birthday in 2019. Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur1 was first published in 1804 after his five-year expedition to the Americas. Ansichten was a small book that fused geology and biology, nature and culture. We assert here that Humboldt’s integrative approach is congruent with the twenty-first-century’s Critical Zone science. ON A SUNNY MORNING in April 2014, historian of geosciences Dr. Enriqueta Barrera of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) opened a meeting of several dozen Earth scientists from across the United States. The group was gathered at Padgett’s Creek Baptist Church in rural South Carolina, in preparation for a field trip to one of the NSF’s newest Critical Zone Observatories (CZO). The Earth scientists were surrounded by flowering dogwoods and gentle mild breeze of early spring in the Piedmont, a region known in colonial times as the “Flower of Carolina.”2 The rural community around the church has about 1,200 inhabitants, many of whom are 132

1 See Alexander von Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1808). The book is most recently published in English as Views of Nature, ed. Stephen T. Jackson, Laura D. Walls, trans. Mark W. Person (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 2 See Scott Huler, A Delicious Country: Rediscovering the Carolinas along the Route of John Lawson’s 1700 Expedition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 3 See http://www.city-data.com/city/Cross-Keys-South-Carolina.html. 4 See Paul S. Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

descendants of multigenerational families. Their average age is about forty, 60% are white and 40% black, and about 25% of those working-age are employed by textile-related industries.3 The landscape and its people have a rich interactive history that is appreciated and explored by contemporary Critical Zone studies that seek to achieve what can be called Humboldtian goals — a merging of scholarly disciplines with rigor and beauty. The US South is well known for its writers such as William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt, Eudora Welty, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, and James Agee. Much less appreciated is that the South is made famous by scientists. Even during the first decades of cotton farming in the early 1800s, the region’s soil erosion and declining soil fertility attracted the attention of geologist Charles Lyell, landscape architect Frederick Olmsted, and agricultural scientist and pro-slavery firebrand Edmund Ruffin. On this bright April 2014 morning, a new generation of scientists meet at Padgett’s Creek Church, excited to learn about the remarkable

geology and agricultural legacies of the Southern Piedmont (see figs. A and B). The well-respected hydrologist and geomorphologist Gordon Grant opened with a general introduction, pointing with outstretched arm to the hay field in front of the church. Grant suggested that beneath the Piedmont’s gently rolling hills were secrets yet to be told, dynamic forces, and past events that were fundamental to the structure and function of the landscape that only a fully integrative Calhoun CZO could discover. In particular, the Piedmont’s declension story of how humans have transformed the land is scientifically, historically, and philosophically stunning. The erosion of soils wrought by Europeans and enslaved African Americans since the late 1700s is nearly unbelievable (see figs. C 1, 2). Farming for cotton, tobacco, and food crops, most intense from 1810 to 1930, eroded a staggering twenty centimeters of soil across more than ten million hectares.4 Today, that eroded soil has buried nearly all bottomlands and floodplains under a meter or more of this legacy

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5 See Terry A. Ferguson et al., “Re-investigation of a colluvially filled valley containing deeply buried organic-rich sediments of Pleistocene age, Pauline, South Carolina,” Southeastern Geological Society of America 51, no. 3 (2019). doi: 10.1130/ abs/2019SE-327726. 6 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, vol. 3, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 321. Originally published in French as Voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, vol. 3 (Paris: J. Smith et Gide Fils, 1825). 7 Robert H. Montgomery, The Cooperative Pattern in Cotton (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 251.

sediment. Of course, in America, “the land of the free,” farming with African slaves eroded more than the soil, a view joined by Alexander von Humboldt, who saw slavery as a critical failure in the young American democracy. The severity of agricultural erosion across a century of agriculture has long astonished scientists, but equally astonishing are the data being assembled by contemporary scientists. They have quadrupled the estimated age of Piedmont soils to a minimum of two to three million years. Over that time, Piedmont s oils have developed deeply. Soil under the church may extend 40 meters over the granite bedrock. The scientists’ work also points to massive instabilities and erosion events throughout geological time.5 These new data challenge the long-standing paradigm that the Piedmont is one of the most geologically stable regions in America. This new perspective of the Piedmont’s inherent instability is reminiscent of Humboldt’s comment made after experiencing an earthquake: “We feel that we have been deceived by the apparent calm of

FIGS: A— In the midst of the Calhoun CZO

encroach on the house from all directions. sits Rose Hill Plantation, which is today All the accelerated erosion, gullies, terraces, restored to its appearance in antebellum and legacy sediments occurred from a cenyears. The plantation is of interest to nat- tury of farming, from about 1820 to 1920. ural scientists, environmental anthropologists, historians, and the public. B— In the high resolution LiDAR image (~10km2), the square in the middle of the image is the Rose Hill house with the rose garden the small rectangle to the north of the house. Severe and deep gullies in the old cotton fields

nature; … we mistrust for the first time a soil, on which we had so long placed our feet with confidence.” 6 By the early 1900s, the region became one of the most severely eroded and gullied in America. At that time, it was also home to many of the nation’s most impoverished people. In 1929 Robert Montgomery, cotton economist at the University of Texas, wrote that farming had turned the South into “a miserable panorama of unpainted shacks, rain-gullied fields, straggling fences, rattletrap Fords, dirt, poverty, disease, drudgery, and monotony that stretches for a thousand miles across the cotton belt.”7 The impoverishment of land and people attracted a wave of scientists in the 1930s, many of whom worked in and around Padgett’s Creek Church. Within kilometers of the church, river sediments were studied by Hans Albert Einstein, who had a lively correspondence about Piedmont erosion with his father, Albert Einstein, then at Princeton. The accomplished geographer Carl Sauer organized Piedmont erosion

research from his home in Berkeley, California. Hugh Bennett, the world’s leading champion for soil-erosion control, actively publicized erosion research across the Piedmont. Sociologist Howard Odum wrote prolifically about the human-soil Piedmont problem, and Duke University ecologist Henry Oosting promoted the concept of plant succession that described how Piedmont fields were transforming into secondary forests. Finally, UCLA’s Stanley Trimble authored the definitive geographic history of agricultural erosion in the Piedmont, a book still in print today.8 By the mid 1930s, the United States Forest Service (USFS) purchased many of the worst-eroded farms in and around Padgett’s Creek Church and launched the nearly 1,500 square kilometers Sumter National Forest. The USFS recognized quickly that they were ill-equipped to manage such degraded lands, and in 1947 opened the Calhoun Experimental Forest, which they claimed represented “poorest Piedmont conditions,”9 given the severity of its land use history, 133

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8 See Stanley W. Trimble, Man-Induced Soil Erosion on the Southern Piedmont, 1700– 1970 (Ankeny, IA: Soil Conservation Society of America, 1974). 9 Louis J. Metz, The Calhoun Experimental Forest (Asheville, NC: USDA Forest Service Southeastern Forest Experiment Station, 1958). 10 See Daniel D. Richter et al., “Evolution of Soil, Ecosystem, and Critical Zone Research at the USDA FS Calhoun Experimental Forest,” in USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges: Research for the Long Term, ed. Deborah C. Hayes et al. (New York: Springer, 2014), 405–33. 11 See Daniel D. Richter and Sharon A. Billings, “‘One physical system’: Tansley’s ecosystem as Earth’s critical zone,” New Phytologist 206, no. 3 (2015): 900–12.

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12 See Henry J. Oosting, “An Ecological Analysis of the Plant Communities of Piedmont, North Carolina,” American Midland Naturalist 28, no. 1 (1942): 1–126.

gullying, sedimentation of streams and riv- work, and in 1962 curtailed research at the Calers, and the socio-economic plight of its people. houn Experimental Forest.10 Fortunately for sciWhile we can find no documentation explaining ence, the scientists meticulously archived their why the experimental forest was named after treasure trove of samples, data, and photographs. The 2014 scientists gathered at Padgett’s John C. Calhoun, the antebellum senator, vice president, and ardent advocate of slavery, we ac- Creek Church are a new wave of investigators to knowledge the irony the name brings to this spe- retake the pulse of this severely damaged land cial landscape. After all, the forest was named by (see fig. D). They were excited not only to study the same USFS personnel who selected this land- the Calhoun landscape but to bring their Critscape for research because it represented “poor- ical Zone science to pursue and integrate their individual sciences in the same landscape. The est Piedmont conditions.” The Calhoun Experimental Forest had new Critical Zone after all is defined by a slogan, laboratories and motivated scientists, including “From tree top to bedrock,” by fluids “from atMarvin Hoover, Carol Wells, Jim Douglass, and mosphere to the deepest circulating groundwaLou Metz. They brought instrumentation like ter,” and by its diverse timescales “across human, neutron probes to measure water deep within ecosystem, and geologic time.” On the landscape soils, and delineated experimental watersheds surrounding Padgett’s Creek Church, the new to measure streamflow response to rainfall on Calhoun CZO would engage geophysics, geodeeply gullied and eroded lands. They were par- chemistry, geomorphology, soil science, ecology, ticularly interested in how flooding would be at- hydrology, environmental history, anthropolotenuated during forest regrowth. Though these gy, and even geopoetry, to gain a Humboldtian Calhoun scientists prolifically published their understanding of the land. The prospects must results, USFS administrators lost interest in the have impressed NSF program manager Barrera, 134

for the Calhoun had recently become one of nine CZOs nationwide and one of dozens worldwide, each testing site-specific hypotheses using tools and ideas from a similarly wide diversity of disciplines. Critical Zone science had been championed by Barrera for years, and by 2014 it was vigorously circulating in the Earth and ecological sciences.11 Another idea of Critical Zone science is that data are to be shared as common stock, with first-author and student rights of use respected. Scientific papers interweave individual sciences to forge a deeper understanding of the Earth. Critical Zone science provides advanced education to students and veteran scientists alike, as it accelerates interdisciplinary and disciplinary sciences. One question that scientists regularly ask at the Calhoun CZO concerns the landscape’s regeneration following accelerated agricultural erosion and gullying. Because the Piedmont’s erosion has diminished greatly during the region’s reforestation since the 1930s, today’s

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taken and archived from the 1930s to the 1950s by the United States Forest Service scientists at the Calhoun Experimental Forest. The Forest Service opened the Calhoun Experimental Forest in 1947 to learn more about managing such fragile and eroded landscapes. D— In 2014 nearly 100 scholars and land managers interrogated the Earth’s Critical Zone on a trip led by Critical Zone scientists across the Calhoun CZO.

impressive green blanket of trees prompts many scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that to suggest that the seriously degraded fields have this reforestation is more mask than recovery; undergone significant recovery and even resto- they argue that the fundamental alteration of ration in a matter of decades. Some reference the Critical Zone by agriculture — including Henry J. Oosting’s old-field succession to de- the hydrology, geomorphology, soils, bioloscribe the process.12 Calhoun Critical Zone sci- gy, biogeochemistry, hillslopes, and floodplains entists, however, bring a more critical perspec- — will be attenuated only over many centuries tive to landscape restoration and recovery, and and millennia. A most important lesson from thus to soil, ecosystem, and Critical Zone evo- the Calhoun CZO may be that landscape restolution. Although the Calhoun scientists are im- ration simply does not apply to how landscapes pressed that Montgomery’s “miserable rain-gul- and ecosystems evolve through time. lied fields” have regrown into an impressive The great intellectual fascination with forest in less than one hundred years, the same Earth’s Critical Zone will always derive from the

extreme diversity among local Critical Zones, as much as from the interweaving of those diverse Critical Zones into the larger Earth system. There is little doubt that this most Humboldtian approach will carry generations of Earth scientists into the future of environmental science — a future in which both place-based and cross-site Critical Zone research will thrive.

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The Critical Zone Revelation, I Am in the Skin William E. Dietrich ONE OF MY FAVOR ITE activities as a child was to climb to the top of the grass-covered hills behind my parent’s house near San Francisco (California) and then slide down the hill on a sturdy piece of cardboard. This often ended in a crash of some sort, leaving me rolling on the grass and partly covered in soil. I found that the Earth has a wonderful smell and feel. This experience must have seeded my interest in nature. When I went to college I sought out geology, something rarely taught in high school in the USA. I wanted to read the Earth text. But I was not drawn to the jagged mountains of bedrock that pierce the sky, but rather to the rolling hills, mantled by soil and often organized into regularly spaced ridges and valleys. Some great set of processes must be at work to create such landscapes. How is it that hard bedrock can be shaped into the smooth rounded (fun to slide down) hilltops? Those valleys bordering the ridges are lined with channels that join downstream, forming a network of progressively larger channels, which convey away water 136

and sediment — and cut into the bedrock itself. Rivers cut down into bedrock; hillslopes emerge between the channels; regular spacing of ridges happens: a self-organized system. No genetic code to guide it. Wow. One rainy day in the mid 1970s, early in my graduate studies at the University of Washington, I sat in my International Harvester fourwheel drive vehicle in the Cascade Mountains and drew in my field book a boxes and arrows flow diagram of how I thought soil-mantled landscapes worked and produced the sediment found in streams. Bedrock must be converted to soil, the soil must move downslope, and the soil must enter the stream. Locally, on steep slopes, the soil mass can collectively fail, producing a landslide, which may carry on down the receiving canyon, scouring it of sediment and delivering it to downstream channels. All this happening over tens to hundreds of thousands of years and, but for the landslides, invisible to the eye. I had spent months walking river channels in the Oregon Coast Range and surveying freshly

made logging road cuts to get a glimpse of the soil and the underlying bedrock. The road cuts showed that the bedrock beneath the soil was greatly altered due to chemical and physical changes as infiltrating rain water passed through it. This weathering was the first step that turned hard bedrock into the mobile material that became the soil that entered streams. The road cuts showed deep tree root penetration and infilled burrows of animals that had dug into the weathered bedrock, suggesting that life was the primary agent breaking up the weathered bedrock and turning it into soil. Looking back now I see that the box and arrows plot I made up became a road map for my research. In my graduate studies, and then through my scientific research career of some forty years, I have sought to identify and to quantify the mechanisms that shape the Earth’s surface. Life was a player in this, but I didn’t really see the whole stage in which it played, and I didn’t recognize this dynamic skin in which we live. It was only recently have I realized that I

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FIGS: A— Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, Northern California, USA, October 2019. Students descending a grass-covered convex-shaped hillslope. B— Eel River CZO, Northern California, USA, July 2015. When a large tree fell downslope, the roots that had penetrated deeply into the underlying weathered bedrock of the Critical Zone pulled up intact weathered bedrock. The broken blocks slowly are released and then tumble downslope as the roots decay. This

had mapped the skeleton of a section of the Critical Zone, but I had not yet seen it as a thing, but rather as a series of interactions that I needed to sort out. About a decade ago, the entirety of the Critical Zone — from forest canopy top down to fresh bedrock — came as a revelation as I leaned against a 60 m tall tree in the Northern California Coast Range. It was a cool afternoon at the end of summer. No rain had fallen for nearly five months, yet the needles of this tree were bright green. The soil it grew in was less than 50 cm thick and, to the touch, very dry. How can such a thin soil provide moisture for a huge tree throughout the dry summer (and to the surrounding dense forest of tall trees)? A quick simple calculation said it couldn’t. I had recently learned that each day hundreds of little mouths (stomata) on individual needles would open to draw in atmospheric carbon, but at a price of losing water. This is how the trees “eat” and “transpire.” That released water elevates the local moisture in the air, cooling it.

That moisture is swept away by winds and can gather with other moisture to form clouds: somewhere to the east, moisture from this tree’s mini mouths were raining out and returning to the ground. I had never looked up before: geologists look at the ground. The tree had to be getting its moisture from a deeper source than the soil. It must be the underlying weathered bedrock. OK, then the depth and porosity of the weathered bedrock must determine how much moisture can be stored there. And what determines that porosity? What converts impermeable bedrock, that we use to make kitchen counters, into the equivalent of a kitchen sponge — holding winter rain that is tapped by tree roots, which then send that water out to the stomata and to the atmosphere? How might the Critical Zone depth influence what vegetation can grow and how vegetation communities will respond to extended drought? Suddenly, I saw that the slow workings of geologic processes, that shape hills and weather to a porous stone the underlying bedrock

process of “tree throw” both produces soil from bedrock and causes downslope transport of soil. C— Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, October 2019. Here, dense marine shale is weathered and broken into a clay rich soil which when wetted in the winter swells and moves downslope. Measurements show the transport rate is proportional to steepness of the slope. The steepens downslope (making the convexity) to accommodate the increasing soil transport.

and produce a mobile soil, were driven by biotic processes that enhanced the storage of water (and nutrients) to life itself: a co-evolving system connected from canopy top down to fresh bedrock. Now I wish I could put on some kind of underground diving gear and swim through the soil and weathered bedrock and see how the deep Critical Zone works and how it varies across different landscapes. Imagine swimming through the root zone and peering close up at the complex root system in which trees share nutrients and disturbance warnings. I would want to dive deep to the fresh bedrock boundary of the Critical Zone and follow that boundary across hillslopes, taking notes on how the boundary varies and what might control that. I would need special magnification on my face mask to see the abundant microbial life there, and I would need to bring my own oxygen, as the microbes will have caused the CO2 to rise to greater than two hundred times our current atmospheric levels. 137

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D— Eel River CZO, August 2017. Students collecting water samples from the Vadose Zone Monitoring System by using a slight vacuum to displace water at depth to the surface. The open panel shows each of the control devices to bring water to the surface. There are two holes with ten sample ports each. E— Eel River CZO, July 2015. On this hillslope, over 500 sensors send data every five minutes to data loggers housed in the wooden structure. Sap flow in trees, moisture

in the soil and underlying bedrock, groundwater levels, air humidity and temperature, solar radiation, wind, and rainfall are all tracked across the hillslope. F— Eel River CZO, July 2015. William E. Dietrich is shown discussing the pattern of moisture availability (documented by Daniella Rempe) and pattern of isotopes in water in the Critical Zone (documented by Jasper Oshun). It is through such measurements that vital processes of the Critical Zone are revealed. G— Eel Riv-

We know that in general the Critical Zone mediates the currencies of watersheds: including water, sediment, biota, and nutrients. Water that saturates the pores in the weathered bedrock forms groundwater that runs off and becomes stream flow. In seasonally dry environments, all the water in streams is drainage from the Critical Zone. Fish habitat and water supply to wildlife and to people in the dry season depends on how much groundwater is stored during the wet

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er CZO, July 2015. By digging with a geologic hammer, William E. Dietrich is showing that the weathered bedrock is highly fractured and loose. Weathering of the bedrock creates porosity in an otherwise dense and nearly impermeable bedrock. On average 300 mm of the annual winter rainfall of 2,000 mm is stored in the weathered bedrock and used by trees during the long hot summers. H— Eel River CZO, October 2015. Installation of the Vadose Zone Monitoring System. The blue

season in the Critical Zone and then slowly released to streams. We must learn how this dynamic, self-organized, co-evolving skin of the Earth works in order to anticipate how water supplies, ecosystems, and climate will change in our warming Earth. Scientists are sometimes criticized for being most excited about what we don’t know. But isn’t that why as children we poke things and taste things, and why we build ships to go to

sleeve is being slid down a hole which was drilled at 55 degrees to the horizontal. On the sleeve’s walls are devices for extracting water and gas and measuring temperature and moisture content every 1.5 m below the surface to about 16 m depth. Monitoring every two weeks was initiated in 2015. This enables tracking of moisture and the chemistry of the water and gasses as they evolve through the unsaturated part of the Critical Zone above the water table.

uncharted waters of the Earth or to the strange worlds beyond this planet? The Critical Zone is where we live and, surprisingly, it is also a frontier area of research. Let’s go back to the hillslope behind the house. Let’s explore down to the fresh bedrock and discovery how this dynamic skin varies across that hill, across watersheds, and across continents. There is so much to read in this Earthly text, and we need to do it now.

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Exploring Trees, Soils, and Microbes in the Streets of Paris

1 Noah Webster, A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, vol. 2 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1800), 376. See William B. Meyer, “Urban Heat Island and Urban Health: Early American Perspectives,” The Professional Geographer 43, no. 1 (1991): 38–48; Aleksandar Rankovic, Chantal Pacteau, and Luc Abbadie, “Services écosystémiques et adaptation urbaine interscalaire au changement climatique: un essai d’articulation,” VertigO, special edition 12 (May 2012), http://journals.openedition.org/ vertigo/11851.

Aleksandar Rankovic UR BAN TR EES, LAWNS, and shrubs surround us, the majority of humans today, every day, in parks or along sidewalks. Fast-paced greening initiatives are multiplying in many cities worldwide, as has recently been best illustrated by New York City’s program MillionTreesNYC and its goal to plant one million new trees across the city in a decade. Such programs usually aim for embellishing cities but also, increasingly, to adapt cities to climate change and make them more livable altogether. Harnessing the healing power of plants to better the lives of urbanites subjected to the harshness of their cities’ climate has long been present in modern thought. Noah Webster, for instance, the lexicographer who compiled the first American English dictionary, worried about the excess heat of cities and its effect on health, writing in 1800 that “wide streets, bordered with rows of trees, would be infinitely preferable to all the artificial shades that can be invented. Trees are the coolers given us by nature.”1 Coolers, yes, or even mere ornaments. In typical modern fashion, we also have a long history of neglecting the 140

agency of trees and other plants, even of those in front of our houses, office buildings, or universities. Now that we expect even more from them, with the threat of climate change, it might finally be time to turn toward them and kindly ask what they have been up to. Their answer, of course, cannot be straightforward, and it will take a lot of patience and scientific mediation to understand even some of the most basic features of their existence. This, in itself, can be true for any organism on Earth. But urban regions are also the most complex, and least well known, parts of the Critical Zone. They are often characterized by high spatial heterogeneity, reduced connectivity, anthropogenic soils, surface sealing, high near-ground atmospheric CO2 concentration, high levels of atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition, increased surface temperatures and heat island effects, high levels of pollutant contamination, hydrologic changes, increased presence of non-native organisms, highly diverse materials and artifacts, intense management practices, and so on.2

Understanding trees in a forest is already a daunting task, but in an urban jungle, it is exponentially more difficult. THE CITY OF PAR IS manages close to 200,000 trees, with about 100,000 in its streets alone (see fig. A). Planting a tree in Paris has rested on similar principles since the nineteenth century and the Haussmannian works that established street tree plantations as part of the Parisian landscape (see fig. B).3 When planting a new sapling (of age seven to nine years), a pit about 1.3 meters deep and 3 meters wide is opened in the sidewalk and fi lled with newly imported peri-urban agricultural soil from the surrounding region. If soil is already in place from a previous tree, it is entirely excavated, disposed of, and replaced. This process occurs because it is assumed that trees “exhaust” soils during their lifespan, and that a “new” soil, full of nutrients, is necessary for the next tree. This “soil exhaustion” hypothesis has never been tested empirically, however. Once a tree and its soil are placed in a sidewalk, surrounded by a landscape

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2 See Mark J. McDonnell and Stewart T. A. Pickett, “Ecosystem Structure and Function along Urban-Rural Gradients: An Unexploited Opportunity for Ecology,” Ecology 71, no. 4 (1990): 1232–7; Lisa G. Chambers et al., “Developing the scientific framework for urban geochemistry,” Applied Geochemistry 67 (April 2016): 1–20. 3 See Patricia Pellegrini, “Pieds d’arbre, trottoirs et piétons: Vers une combinaison durable?,” Développement durable et territoires 3, no. 2 (July 2012), http://developpementdurable.revues.org/9329.

of stone and concrete, it is now up to them to find their own resources: no fertilizers are applied by city managers, nor is irrigation provided. To make things worse, the aboveground leaf litter is almost completely removed every year: no recycling is possible, no rich humus development in sight. No wonder people think that trees will exhaust soil resources to the last drop. But the complex interactions of trees and their soils should not be underestimated. And trees, like all plants, are far from passive organisms: although urban plant ecophysiology is still a nascent discipline, it already shows that plant response to urban environments can be full of surprises.4 But how to explore these responses? How to reveal the agency of street trees and soils, and the strategies they put in place for subsisting? I hypothesized that trying to reconstruct the long-term history of street soils and trees could help us catch glimpses of their mode of existence,5 and this essay is the story of this work. How can one study the history of trees, soils, and their interactions? One way is to use the

FIGS: A— GIS layer produced by the City of Paris, each dot represent a street tree. Highlighted are the locations of silver lindens. B— The Parisian culture of trees, the grid surrounding trees. Then a cart (and its operator) used to move and plant trees, and a sideview of a young tree, with the grid not resting directly on the soil, to avoid its compaction. Georges Lefebvre, Plantations d’alignement; promenades, parcs et jardins publics (Paris:

research apparatus that we ecologists like to call a chronosequence. A chronosequence is an approach, widely used in ecology and soil sciences, based on the assumption that similar systems of different ages, when put into a series of data, can depict a theoretical temporal trajectory for the studied systems. How could we apply this approach to Parisian trees and soils? Remember that in Paris, tree age provides a good proxy of soil-tree system age, e.g., the time that a tree and soil have spent interacting in street conditions. Comparing soils and trees that have just been placed together in Paris to soils and trees that have already spent decades in the city’s street conditions could help us reconstruct an urban ecological history. The first step, here, was to select the tree species to study and then select the precise trees to be studied. This was easier said than done! Put yourself in the shoes of the urban ecologist walking the streets and hoping to find some statistical regularity in the behavior of trees on which virtually no such data is available, and

Vicq-Dunod, 1897), figs. 97, 114, and 15. C— Measuring the circumference of a silver linden “at breast height”. D — The rewarding sight of a 50 cm soil core. E— Sampling the leaves of an old Parisian silver linden.

which live in a milieu that is already giving the researcher a headache. By order of elimination, the choice was set on the beautiful silver linden (Tilia tomentosa), a species from Central Europe, considered well suited for street plantations because of its aesthetics and resistance to street conditions, and which has been used in Paris since at least the nineteenth century. From my understanding, there were about 11,000 of them in the streets of Paris. I first tried to select “my” trees remotely: I explored the databases of the city, and especially the Geographic Information System (GIS) layers that are publically available and which contain, for each tree planted in Paris, the information on its species and its diameter — which I used as a first proxy for tree age. I aimed for the smallest trees (the youngest) and the largest trees (the oldest), and also chose medium-sized trees (of supposed intermediary age). The selection eventually had to be done by foot and by hand, by exploring streets where I knew the silver linden could be found, and measuring and 141

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4 See Carlo Calfapietra, Josep Peñuelas, and Ülo Niinemets, “Urban Plant Physiology: Adaptation-Mitigation Strategies under Permanent Stress,” Trends in Plant Science 20, no. 2 (2015): 72–5. 5 See Aleksandar Rankovic, “Living the street life: Long-term carbon and nitrogen dynamics in Parisian soil-tree systems” (PhD diss., Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 2016). 6 See Markus Ammann et al., “Estimating the Uptake of Traffic-Derived NO from 15N ² Abundance in Norway Spruce Needles,” Oecologia 118, no. 2 (1999): 124–31.

selecting trees that could compose my chronosequence (see fig. C — yes, it was market day). This led to the design of a 75-year chronosequence of street plantations, comprising 78 sites spread across Paris. But now, what to measure, and what to compare? There are hundreds of variables that could have been assessed, but one has to start somewhere. Street trees and soils face quite a puzzling situation. Intuitively, the removal of leaf litter could indeed suggest a gradual loss of organic matter and nutrients from soils. But plants also bring a massive amount of organic matter to soils through their roots, both through exudates and the death and regeneration of fine Ficiisitatur aliquibus corio et volorepero expe magnatis ea sedit esed et qui doluptatur, quis quamus post expedi culparum eniet planda volo doluptium qui dem ipsum que imillesedit etur am, quam et que parchic tota ipsunt. Ihit plam estiiscimus dolo occume maximent asi deribus estiisto odion porenis quam nulpa volor 142

7 See Margaret M. Carreiro and Christopher E. Tripler, “Forest Remnants Along Urban-Rural Gradients: Examining Their Potential for Global Change Research,” Ecosystems 8, no. 5 (2005): 568–82; Nancy B. Grimm et al., “Global Change and the Ecology of Cities,” Science 319, no. 5864 (2008): 756–60; Marina Alberti, “Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics in an Urbanizing Planet,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 30, no. 2 (2015): 114–26.

roots. Very little is known about street trees’ root ecology, or how they explore the confined space of their pit. The soil in pits is also likely to receive a series of contaminants, to be compacted, and to be regularly disturbed… What life could we find in these soils (see figs. D and E)? Furthermore, the urban environment contains more nitrogen sources than other settings. At first, you would probably, maybe amusingly, think this is mostly due to “animal droppings”; it is in fact a much more complex situation. Because of numerous combustion processes (such as car engines and domestic heating), the urban atmosphere is full of nitrogen that can be assimilated by soils and plants, either after it has been deposited on soils or even directly through as mo minvera es et et ut fuga. Nam ant arum quae veliquiatio. Atur? Faccus esto beatium quidus, que et et, esto voloritae qui coria quia venis sintendam repelit, corerest reniam fuga. Et re aliae liquia voluptu rescimus. Gentur sitaspe rovide perum, conseque voluptatur, illa nullupti odipis aut offictas sitatem apiene num verchilit,

leaves. A study of pine trees along a highway in Switzerland estimated that no less than 25% of the nitrogen in their needles originated from car exhausts.6 Trees could thus find benefits in pollution, and become partly independent from their soil … partly landless! In Paris, contrary to what had been assumed, older soils were found to be richer in carbon and nitrogen than younger soils, and contained at least as much carbon and nitrogen as soils from a peri-urban arboretum: they don’t seem to get exhausted with time (see fig. F). Why is this? Street trees seem to develop a higher fine-root density (intermediate and older street trees showed three times more fine roots in the topsoil than younger trees and trees from ut qui dunt, endit la id eum faceatus. Nonsend itenet fuga. Ipsundaes reicient minciis velest re, est experuptae eaqui bea illabor resci delluptatur magnissunt, quodi ut aliquid maxime reptur accuptae consequi qui dolupta deribus simus soluptatqui dolorio. Nam, similicia veriam excera et quia quiscil ipis sunt a que vidio. Et quas

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F— On the left, data on soil organic carbon content and stable isotope ratios. On the right, data on soil nitrogen content and stable isotope ratios. A strong age-related effect is visible for each variable. G— Preparing soils for incubation, to analyze different microbial activities in the lab. H— Soil DNA was extracted, and molecular analyses show that soil microbial communities tend to differ between soil groups (here showing data for soil bacteria).

the arboretum of a similar age), maybe because there is not much space to explore in their pit and they try to maximize the resources they can get from the surface: nutrients, but also water. The accumulation of nitrogen in soils, with a specific isotopic signature, suggests strong inputs to soils from the atmosphere — probably coming from cars. Isotopic data on nitrogen also showed a very strong difference between roots and leaves, maybe the highest difference ever reported in the literature: trees seem to get a substantial amount of their nitrogen from outside of the topsoil. As they grow, and as their need for nitrogen grows as well, street trees seem to develop strategies to acquire nitrogen either from deeper in the pit or outside

of their pits, by exploring under the sidewalks (tree roots usually do not respect the boundaries given to them; they can, for example, be found down in the sewers, to get water) or by directly absorbing nitrogen from car exhausts through their leaves — like the trees along the Swiss highway (see fig. G). Some authors have suggested that urban ecosystems could be seen as “sentinels of change,” foreshadowing what ecosystem responses to global changes, such as global warming and human inputs of nitrogen into the biosphere, could look like in the decades to come.7 What is the broader message that trees are telling us? Their soils are getting richer with time, but they seem to be getting hungrier and thirstier still. The main

reason for this is that the territory we allocate them, these cubes of soil in sidewalks, are too small to sustain them in the long run. Oh, trees are not as docile as we might think; their roots can move and crack the hardest rocks and macadam. But still, living in the street is hard and stressful for them too. What they tell us is that they need us to expand their territory on our sidewalks, they simply need more space in the highly anthropized world they live in. When you think of it, this message actually makes them eloquent representatives for the rest of biodiversity, and true sentinels of the Anthropocene (see fig. H).

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Beware of Precursors: How Not to Trace the History of the Critical Zone Simon Schaffer

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THE R ECENT CONSTRUCTION of the Critical Zone as an object of collectively coordinated surveillance depended on the institution of an innovative and extensive observatory network. This observatory system is defined by the integration of the characteristic sites the stations occupy and, simultaneously, by coordination of the broad scope of what gets done there. Connections within the Earth’s thin surface layer rely on and sustain links in the systems of observatory practice.1 There is an obvious precedent for this Critical Zone network in the innovative earlier nineteenth-century projects to set up observatory networks to scrutinize meteorology and natural history, geomagnetism, and atmospheric physics in regions just below and above the planet’s surface. The protagonists of these observatory networks, scientific servicemen and protagonists of a physics of the globe, conjectured that the phenomena they studied were of worldwide dimensions. Then they used this claim to recruit massive public resources to work at that global scale. Finally, they exploited these resources to seek to make their original conjecture stick. These programs depended on the expansive aims of militant European and North American states. They proclaimed the See Susan Brantley et al., “Designing a network of critadvantages of resident observers ical zone observatories to explore the living skin of the terrestrial earth,” Earth Surface Dynamics 5 (2017): backed with reliable equipment 841–60; Cheryl Lyn Dybas, Discoveries in the Critical Zone: Where Life Meets Rock (Alexandria, VA: Nationin comparison with the allegedal Science Foundation, 2013). ly superficial gaze of the passing Alexander von Humboldt, “Letter on the Advancement traveler. Importantly, they weldof Knowledge of Terrestrial Magnetism,” London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Scied new-fangled systems of comence 9 (July–December 1836): 42–53, here 50. bined scientific labor to the zone See José Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Naconnecting mines and mountains, tion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), oceans, and rivers. 114f. In his 1836 manifesto for what Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the he defined as global “data,” the New Continent, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1851), 270. great Prussian naturalist AlexanOriginally published in French as Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, vol. 1 (Paris: F. der von Humboldt declared that Schoell, 1807). “certainty and importance” could Hanno Beck, “Alexander von Humboldts ‘Essay de be secured only through “estabPasigraphie’ (Mexiko 1803/04),” Forschungen und Fortschritte 32, no. 2 (1958): 33–9, here 37. lishments which shall remain permanent for a great number Here, and in the following, references are to John Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural of years, of Physical ObservatoPhilosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, ries.” 2 Humboldt’s Creole collaband Green, 1831), 349f.; see also Christopher Carter, Magnetic Fever: Global Imperialism and Empiricism in orators and informants in South the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: American America sometimes denounced Philosophical Society, 2009), 32–5.

7 See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 8 Paul Crutzen, “Geology of mankind,” Nature 415, no. 6867 (2002): 23.

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the speed and superficiality of his own rapid travels there.3 For Humboldt, the vertical program that would address the “grand problem of subterranean meteorology” 4 and the physiognomy of life just beneath and just above the surface of the planet was the central endeavor of these new sciences. The aim was to “depict entire countries as a mine is represented.” 5 In 1831, Humboldt’s ally the astronomer John Herschel spelled out how the observatory enterprise would work: “All the information that can possibly be procured, and reported, by the most enlightened and active travelers, must fall infinitely short of what is to be obtained by individuals actually resident upon the spot.” 6 The aim was somehow to combine the expertise of residence with the authority of the observatory to win “that complete acquaintance with our globe as a whole, which is beginning to be understood by the extensive designation of physical geography.” There is thus a long-term history to be explored connecting the very definition of the Critical Zone and models of scientific development with enlightenment and civilization. Sources for the model of the planet showing a laminar zone of biogeological significance have been located in the decades around 1800. Alongside the Humboldtian provenance, the Earth theories and historicist philosophies of the later eighteenth century are especially favored as candidates for the ancestry of this account of the Earth which links its physiology, geology, and surveillance. The Scottish milieu of the gentleman farmer and natural philosopher James Hutton (1726–97) has been singled out as a key moment in the inauguration of the program. Immediate interactions between steam technologies, labor transformation, and new enterprises in political economy and civic polity put this Scottish culture at the center of the transformation that has attracted some of the most intense debate about the advent of the Anthropocene epoch.7 In his important 2002 note on the “geology of mankind,” Paul Crutzen notoriously identified the coincidence between what he chose to call “the design of the steam engine”8 by James Watt in 1784 and the start of the growth of carbon dioxide and methane in polar ice concentrations.The collective civic and industrial network occupied by Watt and his colleagues, including Hutton, Joseph Black, David Hume, and Adam Smith, lay at a fateful fulcrum of social and physical transformations. The network including James Hutton as well as Adam Smith, of whom Hutton was the literary executor, insisted that

the system of the Earth be understood as a complex machine. The sanctification of James Hutton — and, by implication, the The key object that bound these two models together was the specific traditions on which he drew in geotheory and the precsteam engine. The Earth understood as steam engine generat- edents he found in classical and early modern doctrines of pured the notion of a coordinated zone of earthly activity. Perhaps posive design and the system of the world — has played a sigit was therefore unsurprising that when seeking a genealogy nificant role in subsequent formulations of the disciplinary for his own account of the Earth system, James Lovelock would site for studies of ecosystems and geobiology. In the inaugural find it in the late Enlightenment world of Smith, and especial- pages of a new journal on the health of marine ecosystems in ly of Hutton. In 1972, recalling his proposal for the very term 1992, it was argued bluntly that “the concept of ecosystem health “Gaia” and its derivation from the Greek personification of was probably first applied by James Hutton, a Scottish physician Earth as mother, Lovelock remarked that “the concept of Gaia and geologist, who in 1788 delivered a paper to the Royal Sohas been intuitively familiar throughout history and perhaps ciety of Edinburgh on a theory of the Earth as a superorganonly recently has it been distorted by anthropocentric ration- ism capable of self-maintenance.” 17 Similarly, in the very first alizations.”9 Pressed to locate this concept in a better lineage, article published in a new journal on geobiology in 2003, the Lovelock claimed that Hutton had lectured at the Royal Society Harvard biologist Andrew Knoll cited Lovelock’s judgment that of Edinburgh in the 1790s on the Earth as a “superorganism” to “the founding document of geobiological thought is none other be studied through physiology; the subsequent view of Earth than the foundational text of modern geology, James Hutton’s from space allegedly confirmed Hutton’s notion of Earth as su- (1788) Theory of the Earth” and that “Hutton’s arguments strike perorganism; and in Hutton’s honor, Lovelock named his own the 21st century reader as surprisingly modern, but then our science “geophysiology.” 10 sense of modernity in geological thought derives in no small The provenance of these keywords in the vocabulary of Gaia measure from Hutton himself.” 18 Knoll did note that Hutton is telling. James Hutton never spoke of a superorganism nor of made no outright acknowledgment that life was any imporany physiology of the Earth. Furthermore, his model was ruth- tant part of geologically significant process. More boldly, the lessly teleological: this was a machine subject to a purpose.11 Princeton ecologist Simon Levin a couple of years later simply The word “superorganism” was coined in the mid-1890s to ex- restated Lovelock’s attribution to Hutton of the lapidary claim press one version of the organic metaphor of the state: large- that “I consider the Earth to be a scale social communities were to be understood as structured superorganism and … its proper 9 James Lovelock, “Gaia as seen through the atmoslike biological systems, often with a white supremacist sense of study should be by physiology.” 19 phere,” Atmospheric Environment 6, no. 8 (1972): 579f., here 580. This form of creative historevolutionary ascendancy and interracial struggle.12 The term “geophysiology” was introduced into Earth sciences at exact- ical invention is not of itself im- 10 See James Lovelock, “The Earth as a Living Organism,” in Biodiversity, ed. E. O. Wilson (Washington, DC: Naly the same moment by the pre-eminent Oxford geographer mensely significant. More indicational Academies Press, 1988), 486–9; James Lovelock, “Geophysiology,” Transactions of the Royal SoHalford Mackinder to encompass the disciplinarily geographic tive, however, is the relation it ciety of Edinburgh 80, no. 3–4 (1989): 169–75, see 13 study of climates and of organic life. It somehow seemed use- implies between the active surveilespecially 169. ful for Lovelock, however, instead to locate such idioms of an an- lance of the Critical Zone and the 11 See Cándido Manuel García Cruz, “De la ‘Teoria de la imate planet not in the Gilded Age racial science and geopoli- other kinds of disciplinary pracTierra’ de James Hutton a la ‘Hipótesis Gaia’ de James Lovelock,” Asclepio 59, no. 1 (2007): 65–100, see estics that spawned them, but in the Edinburgh Enlightenment. tices pursued within geophysiolpecially 96. Lovelock’s source for this version of Hutton was a pair of lec- ogy. Hutton’s schemes provided 12 See Daniel Brinton, The Basis of Social Relations: A tures, one given in 1948 on the 150th anniversary of Hutton’s none of the materials attributed Study in Ethnic Psychology (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 39. death at Edinburgh by the geologist Sergei Tomkeieff, the oth- to them by twenty-first-centuer delivered by one of Tomkeieff’s students, Donald McIntyre, ry practitioners of geophysiology, 13 See Halford Mackinder, “Modern Geography, German and English,” Geographical Journal 6, no. 4 (1895): to the American Geological Society in 1962. According to Tom- but nevertheless reordered and 367–79, see especially 375. keieff, the Edinburgh natural philosopher made no distinction focused traditions within mo14 Sergei I. Tomkeieff, “James Hutton and the philosobetween organic and inorganic materials and accepted the no- dernity’s notions of the animate phy of geology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section B: Biological Sciences 63, no. 4 tion of the Earth “as a sort of superorganism.”14 In this, so Tom- planet and its quality as a complex (1949): 387–400, here 398–400. keieff claimed, Hutton strikingly anticipated both Alfred North system. Hutton was intimately in15 See ibid., see especially 398–400. Whitehead’s version of organicism and Vladimir Vernadsky’s volved in the early stage of the 15 concept of the biosphere. Speaking at a similarly celebratory massive reorganization of agri- 16 Donald B. McIntyre, “James Hutton and the Philosophy of Geology,” in The Fabric of Geology, ed. Claude C. and disciplinary occasion, McIntyre echoed the claim: “the secret cultural production and the poAlbritton (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1963), 1–11, of Hutton is that he thought of the world as a sort of superorgan- litical economy of agrarian labor here 7. ism. His was not the mind of a narrow specialist. For him the bio- and its effects. He thus applied 17 Peter Calow, “Can ecosystems be healthy? Critical consideration of concepts,” Journal of Aquatic Ecosyslogical sciences were completely integrated with the physical.”16 Scottish experimental chemistry tem Health 1 (1992): 1–5, here 1.

18 Andrew Knoll, “The geological consequences of evolution,” Geobiology 1, no. 1 (2003): 3–14, here 3. 19 Simon Levin, “Self-Organization and the Emergence of Complexity in Ecological Systems,” BioScience 55, no. 12 (2005): 1075–9, here 1075.

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and thermal measures to the puzzles of Earth history in a set- “in politics, it took a long time before we recognized that feedting dominated by the principles of the division of labor and back from market forces could not be ignored; I suspect that we exploitation described by his friend Smith, whose writings he face a similar slow learning process about our relationship with edited as executor. In writings now anachronistically read as the Earth. Meanwhile we are still trying to shape it to our needs the founding texts of modern geology, Hutton explained the and we ignore, even disable, its own powerful guiding hand.” It is plausible to conjecture that this kind of market politics course of Earth’s history as guided by an invisible hand so that the amount and quality of cultivable land was preserved and the played its role in the widespread decision to choose Hutton as security of landowning agrarians secured. There was a precise the ancestor of contemporary geophysiology. Hutton was clear equivalence between Hutton’s Earth history and Smith’s politi- that the planet must be seen as a machine, a system of circulacal economy: in both systems, apparently errant individual be- tion that evidenced processes of repair, circulation, and reprohavior in the natural economy (such as volcanic eruptions and duction: “We are thus led to see a circulation in the matter of gaseous uplift) or the moral economy (such as individual self-in- this globe, and a system of beautiful œconomy in the works of terest) were in fact means of maximizing the welfare of the nature. This earth, like the body of an animal, is wasted at the whole of nature (through processes such as preservation of fer- same time that it is repaired.”23 This was a machine in the form tile soil) or society (through the increase in common wealth).20 of what he called “an organised body”24 that was capable, like The enlightened agronomist became surveyor of the entire a highly idealized Watt engine, of self-repair and maintenance. planet (see fig. 1), with agricultural production as the goal of the Crucially, life was understood not as the principal part of the invisible hand’s wise governance. Hutton compared the limit- machine’s function, but rather as its ultimate goal: “the circulaed view of mere shepherds and tion of the blood is the efficient cause of life; but, life is the final farmhands who saw no change in cause, not only for the circulation of the blood, but for the rev20 See R. Grant, “Hutton’s theory of the earth,” in Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of Environmenmountain or valley with the per- olution of the globe.”25 The potent claims that humanity played tal Sciences, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of spective of the informed philoso- a decisive role in Earth history as “efficient cause,” and that the Science, 1997), 37–51; Charles W. J. Withers, “On pher who could divine a system planet itself was to be seen as animate, were absorbed and then Georgics and Geology: James Hutton’s ‘Elements of Agriculture’ and Agricultural Science in Eightof change and wisdom: “It is thus effaced in Huttonian geotheory. eenth-Century Scotland,” Agricultural History Review Hutton’s avid interpreter Humboldt never used such nothat a system may be perceived in 42, no. 1 (1994): 38–48. that which, to common observa- tions as “superorganism” or “geophysiology.” Yet, he much 21 James Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of tion, seems to be nothing but the more clearly debated the active agency of organisms in the sceKnowledge, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: A. Strahan, and T. Cadell, 1794), 239; see also Martin J. S. Rudwick, disorderly accident of things; a nography and physiognomy of the planet’s history. His admiraBursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: Universystem in which wisdom and be- tion for Hutton was clear, and he used the Edinburgh theorist sity of Chicago Press, 2005), 160f. nevolence conduct the endless or- to reassess the data he’d collected in his surveys of the so-called 22 Here and in the following James Lovelock, “Selfder of a changing world.” 21 Find- New World after 1800: “Hutton was without doubt on the ish Greens,” Prospect, June 20, 2004, http://www. ing Hutton as an ancestor thus path to a large number of things which we now know or beprospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/selfishgreens. matched Lovelock’s attitude to lieve,” Humboldt wrote. “I regard it is as a great misfortune not 23 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Ilthe Smithian invisible hand. He to have read Hutton before my departure for the Americas. The lustrations, vol. 2 (London: Cadell, Junior, and Davies; Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795), 562. has compared the dilemma of sciences of combination are not created all of a sudden.” 26 Combi24 James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation self-interest that Smith’s prin- nation would turn out to be decisive in the reformation of the of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissoluciple of the invisible hand was animate world. The fascinating relationship between Humboldt tion, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): supposed to resolve with that and the traditions of human agency and of a living planet em209–307, here 216. of “selfish genes” and natural se- bodied and debated in early modernity and the Enlightenment 25 Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. 2, 546. lection which nevertheless per- help show how, in the enterprises in which Humboldt and his mit the emergence of a common collaborators engaged, models of the system of the Earth were 26 Letter from Alexander von Humboldt to François Arago, 19 February 1840, in Correspondance d’Alexandre good. Gaia theory holds that “as gradually reconstructed as accounts of an Earth system. Humd’Humboldt avec François Arago, ed. Théodore Jules Ernest Hamy (Paris: Guilmoto, 1909), 185. Translated our planet evolves, it keeps its cli- boldt’s great survey of this system was entitled Cosmos: A Sketch from the French, emphasis added. mate and its chemistry always fit of a Physical Description of the Universe, a work he started writing 27 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a for life. The invisible hand that in 1819.27 He long pondered its proper title. In the end (and in Physical Description of the Universe, 5 vols., trans. regulates the earth system oper- German), he chose Kosmos because it explicitly and unavoidably Elise C. Otté (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866). Originally published in German as Kosmos: Entwurf ates through feedbacks, negative linked heavens and Earth in a single whole, precisely because it einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: and positive, between its living was “quite opposed to ‘Gaea,’” 28 a term then associated with the J. G. Cotta, 1845–62), 22. and non-living parts.”22 The po- physical survey published by the Berlin teacher August Zeune, a 28 Letter from Humboldt to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, 24 October 1834, in Letters of Alexander von litical message was unmistakable: solid and orthodox account of the geography of the Earth. Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense from 1827–1858, trans. Friedrich Kapp (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1860), 38. Originally published in German as Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Varnhagen von Ense (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1860); see also Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: A European Explorer and His American Disciples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87.

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Fig. 1: James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, vol. 1 (London: Cadell, Junior, and Davies; Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795), plate 3. James Hutton’s representation of an unconformity at Jedburgh in the Scottish borders, where sandstone overlays shale, engraved from a drawing by Hutton’s collaborator John Clerk. The orderly society of agriculture and civilization is sustained by the succession of layers deposited in Earth history.

Humboldt and his allies aimed to innovate and systematize the survey sciences and the biogeography and cosmology they inherited and accumulated. They assembled resources to suggest how living beings could play a fundamental role in the transformation of the planet, exactly the notion absent from Hutton’s writings. It was in the cartographic and survey programs of Humboldt and his interlocutors in Europe and the Americas that the lineaments of a theory of the Critical Zone were constructed. Their insight — that the thin biofilm beneath and above the planet’s surface is where atmosphere and geology have been modified by life — draws much of its plausibility from the data systems inaugurated at that earlier nineteenth-century moment of the imperial meridian and the aggressive scrutiny of the planet that accompanied it. Crucial

BEWARE OF PRECURSORS

here, no doubt, was the enterprise of the survey: the centralized accumulation of immense series of data extracted and extorted from geological, paleontological, meteorological, and natural historical traces, juxtaposed and compared in a science of combination.29 In choosing Hutton as ancestor, versions of climate science and geophysiology have selected a machinist and a teleological model of the system much indebted to the carbon transformation of the world economy. This is a provenance that undermines the enterprise whose ancestry is at stake. By reflecting instead on the preconditions of the systems of representation, information, and combination that made possible the modeling of and inquiry into the biogeography of the Earth’s surface and crust, a better history of the 29 See Michael Dettelbach, “The Face of Nature: Precise Critical Zone as concept and aim

Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Work of Alexander von Humboldt,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 30, no. 4 (1999): 473–504; Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” Isis 109, no. 1 (2018): 28–55.

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Sarah Sze as the Sculptor of Critical Zones

1 See Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison, and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten: A Book about the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding another Zero (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982). 2 See Bruno Latour and Timothy M. Lenton, “Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to Understand,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 659–80.

Bruno Latour IF I WAS AWESTRUCK by this version of Timekeeper, it is because Sarah Sze managed to bring about a model perfectly attuned to the actual state of our material conditions, seen from within. It took a sculptor to curb our obsession with the globe, as if the fine arts could also yield discoveries able to give object lessons to scientists and their findings. Viewers experience first an arresting effect of multiplicity when they encounter the Timekeeper series for the first time, or when they close in on its shimmer. It’s pullulating. And this is indeed why astronomical space is so distinct from the Critical Zone: the latter is heterogeneous. When you consider a terrain, a forest, a city, or a body, each and every centimeter is different. Each and every detail matters. The space is not isotropic, and cannot be unified quickly. What must be conveyed first are profusion and superposition. Sarah Sze manages to do this not by scattering nature’s component parts, but by multiplying the elements we must learn to compose with, frame by frame, piece by piece, pixel by pixel. 148

Second, there is the issue of scale. No one has of a door, a cell, a galaxy, a hair, a truck… each ever managed to assess the scale of Sarah Sze’s and every thing surveys all others according to artworks. Nobody knows whether they repre- its own metrics, in its own way. Indeed, doesn’t sent the infinitely large or the infinitely small, the very definition of Gaia hold that the smallwhether they champion atoms or viruses. In the est parts (bacteria) eventually form the largest case of astronomical view, everything is neatly ensembles (the atmosphere)?2 It is impossible arranged by size, as perfectly as in Powers of Ten, to hierarchize in a single definite order of precthe remarkable short film produced by Charles edence all the elements contributing to the anand Ray Eames.1 Although we are well aware of imation of the Critical Zone. Of all things, the its trickery, of the fabricated nature of its seam- measure is each thing. less traveling shot, we are irresistibly engrossed This extraordinary vision does not stop here. in the montage, believing it, in the same way How do you address the issue of the viewer’s powe feel we are floating through space when us- sition? How do you solve the problems brought ing Google Earth — while in reality the comput- by any type of global vision? In front of a globe, er merely switches between databases. The same everybody feels like Atlas, as powerful as a god. protocol will not apply to Sarah Sze’s work: the Global vision prompts hegemonic abuse, facilicloser you get, the less you can hold on to con- tating unchecked maneuvers towards power or cepts like traveling shots or nesting dolls. knowledge. The globe makes the megalomaniYet her goal is not to make you feel discom- ac. How can we watch the world without seeing bobulated. On the contrary, she is simply being it as — at best — a mere spectacle to enjoy, or a realist. Like her art, the world she aims to de- — at worst — a territory to seize by force? pict does not follow Google Earth’s logic. A drop Sarah Sze does give a successful answer: viewof milk, a puma roaming the wild, the fragment ers must be surrounded by the artwork as they

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FIGS: A|C— Sarah Sze, Flash Point (Timekeeper), 2018. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation views Gagosian, 2018/19.

tiptoe towards it. Layer upon layer, veil upon veil, reflection upon reflection — this is how viewers can escape the dichotomy between seeing inside-out or outside-in, as if they were caught in a vortex, or pushed onto a carousel. They become “composers of space” in their own right, explicitly so when their T-shirts briefly stand as some of the many screens on which the projections appear, hosting this or that thing visitors will have to compose with. For the Critical Zone cannot be escaped, cannot be judged from a distance — and this is one of the most exact characteristics of the verifiable image of the world. What’s more, the artist has undone another limitation tied to an astronomical view: the continuous and homogeneous representation of all successive layers harboring life on Earth — as if the Critical Zone looked like a mille-feuille or a pile of mattresses — stacking geospheres, hydrospheres, biospheres, atmospheres, and so on. On the contrary, Sarah Sze’s assemblages are never structured through continuous, self-contained envelopes that would stand apart one

from another. Each one is permeable, and every one is constantly interrupted. What matters is the intermeshing of the components rather than their similarity. Water, CO2, ozone, migratory birds, pollutants, bacterial plasmids, financial flows, iterations of memes: they each follow a different cycle that intersects all others but do not form a spherical structure. Besides, in front of Timekeeper, the clicks and gasps of the sonic landscape invented by the sculptor prevent you from imagining yourself casually sitting in front of a spectacle simply meant to be enjoyed from afar. Once again, the lack of tidiness is striking, not because it would answer the need for an artificial injection of disorder, but conversely because it strives to replicate realistically the heterarchy that characterizes life on Earth. Sarah Sze sculpts the anti-sphere as well as the anti-globe. This modus operandi is precisely what confers most of their realism on the images of the world Sarah Sze manages to animate. After all, the living beings of the Critical Zone also have limited means to elaborate their great schemes:

they would use the most ordinary objects readily available and hastily throw them together, patch up whatever might last longer or better the best they could, relying solely on fleeting opportunities. This explains the eerie familiarity viewers experience when they come into contact with Sarah Sze’s work: everything is structured, balanced, composed with care, yet everything is eminently fragile. Indeed, scientists have dubbed as “critical” the zone they are trying to define in contrast to nature or the cosmos, for the very reason that it is extremely fragile and obstinately resilient. Earth — the Earth we actually live on — is not monumental at all. Consequently, its sculpted representation must also avoid monumentality by all means.

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This Planet Which Is Not One: On the Notion of Zone Jeanne Etelain THE EARTH HAS long been conceptualized via the figure of the globe. The confrontation between an ahistorical, disinterested eye and an external, inert world seen only from afar seems rather too clearly required by a predatory culture. For the Earth is conceived as a uniform and unified totalizing whole that can be appropriated, divided, and exploited at the risk of endangering life. In these terms, the planet never amounts to anything more than an abstract ball structured with vertical lines, horizontal parallels, and right angles: a homogeneous, continuous, universal space. Yet “where are you residing when you say that you have a ‘global view’ of the universe?,” asks Bruno Latour.1 In the age of human-induced environmental disaster, it is no longer possible to pretend to see the Earth from outside; we cannot deny that we are on it and that it responds to us. Isabelle Stengers speaks of the intrusion of Gaia. This Goddess, however, is nothing like Mother Nature, the generous one who continuously provides for us despite how we 150

1 Here Bruno Latour paraphrases Peter Sloterdijk in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 123. Originally published in French as Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte, 2015). 2 There has been some confusion between zone and climate. Although both express the inclination of the Earth in relation to the Sun, climate (from the Greek “to slant”) translates the length of the days while zone translates the length of the shadow. See Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2003), 50–3. 3 Ibid. 4 See Jeanne Etelain, “Qu’appelle-t-on zone? A la recherche d’un concept manqué,” Les Temps modernes, no. 692 (2017): 113–35.

treat her. Gaia is a set of interconnected entities that function in their own way, with their own goals, yet together create the ideal physicochemical conditions of their existence. Her geography is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, and more subtle than is commonly imagined — in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on oneness. And, above all, Gaia is ticklish. Thus, a group of scientists are working to rework the concept of Earth with that of the Critical Zones. The term refers to the heterogeneous portions of the planet’s surface, which stretch from the top of the tree canopy to deep underground, encompassing all of the processes that make life possible. Put another way, Critical Zones form the skin of Gaia. But why opt for the term “zone”? Perhaps “land” is too embedded within the nature-talk, “territory” sounds too political, and “area” reads as overly geometrical. Perhaps, too, the term better connotes the sense of the unknown, reminiscent of a mysterious place such as the one visited by the characters in

Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction movie Stalker (1979). In any case, “zone” emphasizes a different topography, one that challenges and resists established notions of space. “Zone” comes from the Greek zôné, derived from the verb zonnunai, “to gird,” which itself is derived from the Sanskrit junāmi, “to join, to link.” Although it designates a girdle or belt in Homer, it was mainly a scientific term used in premodern cosmology. Zones appear in an ancient speculative theory and cartographic representations of the world, which became outdated through fifteenth and sixteenth century sea expeditions. Greek astronomers inferred from the sphericity of the Earth and its inclination relative to the Sun the division of the planet’s surface into five latitudinal areas (one torrid, two frigid, and two temperate) according to the length of the shadow cast on a gnomon.2 Put literally, terrestrial zones were conceived of as the belts of the Earth. But the theory goes further. It led to certain beliefs about the habitability of the planet and

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5 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). Originally published in French as Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977). 6 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” [1905] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), 123–243. Originally published in German as Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1905).

the perfect conditions under which life could flourish. Since exposure to the Sun was considered either too long or too short in the torrid and frigid zones, these were considered inhospitable. As for the temperate zone located in the southern hemisphere, the Antipodes, it was regarded as habitable yet unknowable because inaccessible due to the deadly heat of the torrid zone that isolates it. That is why, according to historian Jean-Marc Besse, early modern Portuguese austral navigations — which demonstrated to Europeans that the torrid zone could be crossed and even inhabited — invalidated the doctrine of zones and prompted the formation of a new concept of the Earth.3 Maps derived from this ancient doctrine stand out from T-O maps and other medieval varieties that depict only the ecumene: the known and inhabited world. On the contrary, zonal maps offer an entire view of the planet showing little interest in topography such as relief, hydrography, or settlement. However, they have nothing to do with the imaginary of the globe, which drives

FIGS: A— Figure from Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire: Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse [1964] (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 163. B— David Woodward, the tripartite type of mappamundi, 1987. A T-O map is a type of European medieval world map that represents the three known continents (Asia, Europe, and Africa) divided by the “T” formed by the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile River, and encircled by the “O” of the Ocean beyond which

the concept of a universal Earth wherein the ecumene fully coincides with the terrestrial orb considered in its totality. If only one part of the world is habitable, then the doctrine of zones entails that space is heterogeneous from the point of view of physics, discontinuous from the point of view of mathematics, and regional from the point of view of human existence. Locating the ecumene in relation to the rest of the Earth, zonal maps decenter human beings and relativize the size of their world with respect to the extent of the planet. Moreover, the doctrine emerges from a reflection on the relation of the Earth to the Sun within the cosmos. For both these reasons, zone appears as a relational concept while pertaining to a consideration of the whole and its parts. Unlike the globe, which imposes its oneness, zones always express a relation between at least two terms (e.g., the Earth/ the Sun, as well as the ecumene/the planet). This is perhaps why the various uses of the word suggest that it connects as much as it divides.4 Zones, always at least double, come inevitably in the plural.

the Earth ends. C— David Woodward, the zonal type of mappamundi, 1987. D — Kamal Zharif Kamaludin, Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, Pudong, Shanghai, China, 2010. Photograph.

The differential ontology that underpins zones has not escaped the attention of feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. In This Sex Which Is Not One she rejects the monist Freudian theory of sexuality, one which undermines (sexual) difference in favor of the primacy of the male sexual organ in the constitution of the human psyche.5 Instead, she explores a pluralist theory of sexuality using as an alternative paradigm the female genitals, conceived not as being composed of one, but of at least two organs: the vulva’s touching lips. She progressively pluralizes sexuality further by referring to the very multiplicity of women’s — but arguably of all humans’ — erogenous zones, ranging from the tips of the nipples to the core of the clitoral hood. The concept of erogenous zone was first coined by Sigmund Freud. It is precisely the observation that “certain regions of the body” (Körperstellen), other than the genitals, are experienced as pleasurable that leads him to elaborate a non-reproductive theory of sexuality.6 It is telling that Freud substitutes the word “zone” 151

E

7 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Viking Press, 1977), especially 43–60, for an extensive analysis. Originally published in French as L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972). 8 Sigmund Freud, “Three essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 169. 9 This principle of differentiation is also found in land-use planning: zoning consists in dividing a city or a territory according to specific purposes alongside permitted uses and exceptional regulations. See Etelain, “Qu’appelle-t-on zone?”

for Stelle, meaning “place” or “position,” but also “point” or “digit.” Whereas Stelle designates pregiven units that can be gathered into a whole, such as a straight line or a set of numbers, zones are always partial, to use Mélanie Klein’s words, meaning untotalizable.7 Thus, the erogenous body differs equally from the organism — the organized functional body found in biology — and the phenomenal body — an unequivocal lived, occupied place. Although one zone always calls for another — the mouth sucks, the hand caresses, and the arms embrace — connecting zones together will never yield a well-rounded body. We should be careful therefore not to allow the theory of erogenous zones to become too easily associated with the psychosexual stages. Freud paved the way when he imagined a progressive integration of the erogenous zones into a harmonious whole. Each stage — the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital — is matched to a different erogenous zone as the primary source of pleasure. Ordered in a temporal 152

10 First developed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten. Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1999); then reworked in Chapter 3: Planetarity in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 71–102. 11 See Jeanne Etelain, “La caresse philosophe,” La Deleuziana, no. 6 (2017): 40–9.

sequence, transitioning from early childhood to adulthood, and intertwined with complex psychic mechanisms, zones become instrumental in the libidinal organization of the body unified under the rule of the phallus. This teleological development is exactly what Irigaray rejects, for it reduces difference to oneness. In her text, she revives instead the anarchic multiplicity found at the core of erogenous zones. Using the notion of “drive,” psychoanalysis resorts to a conceptual framework borrowed from modern physics and sees the body as an energetic field rather than an extended surface (res extensa). In this understanding, subdivisions of space that we normally envision as static and unchanged locations imply the idea of mobile areas activated by a stream of energy. Accordingly, space would be indeterminate in terms of its divisions as well as fundamentally dynamic in character, moving us well beyond conceptions of space as some kind of empty, homogeneous container. The sense of swarming indetermination is further supported when Freud argues that

the skin, and by extension the whole surface of the body, is the erogenous zone “par excellence.” 8 Is it stretching it too far to bring the planet together with the erogenous body? Despite the almost two millennia separating psychoanalysis from ancient cosmology, it seems clear that both notions of zone depart from an imaginary centered around oneness. Both envision another kind of totality, one that is neither atomist nor holist, since the part is always richer than the whole and the whole is nothing but partial. That is why talking about the zones of Gaia might change our conception of her, imagining her less like a superorganism. Furthermore, the zone paradigm invokes in both theories a surface — be it the Earth or the body — that is heterogeneous, relational, multiple, indeterminate, and dynamic. Thus, zones would correspond to differentiated spaces — hence the need to qualify them with the use of adjectives such as “temperate” or “torrid.” 9 Thinking of the Earth as we think of a lover might not be such an odd idea. Ecosexual

F

E— The five zones of the Earth. In Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, manuscript on parchment (ca. 1150), f. 34r. F— Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979. Film, 161 min.

activists lead by performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens consider, for example, that the lover archetype is more ethical insofar as a lover must care for their romantic partner or they will likely lose them. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak advocates a similar analogy when she imagines the planet as the “home”

of all living beings, a generative source akin to the female womb, which is as uncanny (unheimlich).10 Her argument acquires a special resonance in the Anthropocene: as landscapes, seasons, and species undergo radical changes, our surroundings become increasingly unfamiliar, even threatening. And many are aware of

an ambient feeling, reflected in apocalyptic discourses, that we may no longer be welcome at home. To conclude, I would simply add that if Stengers is right to describe Gaia as ticklish, then the Critical Zone might be especially so. Perhaps our task, as Earthbounds, is to caress them.11

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IV.

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GAIA “We have become accustomed to the following story about life on Earth. We are supposed to live on a planet where providential conditions have endured ever since the origin of life … In this familiar story, geology has provided a stage, independent of life’s activities, to which life’s only duty is to adapt.”

1

This story “transforms the continuity and development of Life on Earth into the result of a miraculous harmony. By chance, or should we say, by providential foresight, geology has made itself ‘just perfect’ as a paradise of organisms. But who created this paradise? Is there a mysterious power above Earth and Life?” (Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil, “What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia?”). Shifting attention from Critical Zones to Gaia — the second step in our landing on Earth — means a deep change in the agents at work in what we used to call “nature” and an attempt to avoid any providential or miraculous narrative. The shift is demonstrated in this section thanks to three decisive chapters by Timothy M. Lenton, a student of James E. Lovelock, and Sébastien Dutreuil, a historian of the science of Gaia. “The myth that Life is just a passive actor adapting to a stage set by physical, chemical, and geological processes has exploded in the face of the knowledge summarized here. With just a tiny fraction of incoming solar energy, Life has largely freed itself from the constraints imposed by physical, chemical and geological processes, principally by cycling the chemical elements it needs within the Critical Zone” (Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil, “What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia?”). This means that on Earth at least, the distinction between life forms and environment breaks down; which also means that the scientific disciplines which try to understand the world we live in have great difficulty in focusing on Gaia. As Lenton and Dutreuil show, neither geologists, nor Earth system science, nor biologists have realized how original, how idiosyncratic, Gaia is. Hence the great paradox of a major discovery that everyone in practice takes for granted — the self-regulation by life of the Earth’s thin surface — even though the terms of the discovery remain immensely far from common sense. Dutreuil shows us the problem: “It is because the activities of the beings we classically recognize as living overflow and exceed what we classically recognize as the inanimate world that we must, precisely, revise the idea that this world is inanimate.” But this does not mean that the Earth is an organism, a big animal; it simply means that on Earth you cannot distinguish what an organism is from the habitability conditions that allow this animal to survive. “Gaia is not in contradiction with evolutionary biology; it is simply the study of a new being.” And it’s inside this new being that every life form has ever resided. Hence the crucial importance of learning what is it composed of and how it reacts to human actions. “When Lovelock uses ‘life,’ however, he does not use it

as a term for a class, but as a proper name designating a singular entity: all the living organisms that have succeeded each other since the origin of Life.” Learning about Gaia really looks like an episode of Star Trek about the exploration of a foreign planet — Ali Gharib implements this idea. A new feeling for cybernetic feedback mechanisms has to be invented as Alexander W. Schindler and Anne Schreiber propose. Perhaps the exploration requires, as Bettina Korintenberg shows, the powers of fiction to recreate what it is to live in an artificial Earth, as in the exciting experiment of Biosphere 2. Meaning a return to the strange year 1610 as Pauline Goul argues? What opens up when looking differently at the components of Gaia is a sense that you can free yourself from the narrow limits imposed by physical geography. Take, for instance, the case of rivers so beautifully recast by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha: A river is not necessarily a flow inside well-defined banks drawn on a map as one single network. If you take the case of the Ganges, it is an entirely different phenomenon that should rather be called “wetness.” “The Sanskrit word for this all-encompassing ocean is Sindhu.” “It then does not flow as water does, but rather soaks, blows, seeps, osmotes, and transpires its way to ever-extending holdings of wetness, holdings that eventually become the ocean that reconnects with the wind.” Once again, the strange thing is not that we have to learn how to animate the Earth anew, but why it has been considered as inanimate for so long. According to Laura Dassow Walls, this was already Alexander von Humboldt’s definition of Erdkunde, those “tidings of the Earth” so important in the Romantic period, and even earlier with Athanasius Kircher, as related by Siegfried Zielinski. As Dassow Walls says about Humboldt: “The novelty lies in his direction of travel: After millennia of longing to ascend from Earth, to escape it to reach for the stars, he invites us instead to ‘descend to our own planet’ to see it anew, to see a new world — more, to inhabit a new cosmology — that does not divide us from the heavens but connects us with them, linking ‘the realms of infinity’ with the swarms of ‘minute microscopic animal and vegetable organisms which exist in standing waters and on the weather-beaten surface of our rocks.’” Humboldt showed us Earth as “the star to which one returns.” His unfinished fifth volume of Cosmos, seems to be the book we still have to write.

2

What Exactly Is the Role of Gaia? Timothy M. Lenton and Sébastien Dutreuil

The Providential Story: No Role for Gaia

WE HAVE BECOME accustomed to the following story about life on Earth. We are supposed to live on a planet where providential conditions have endured ever since the origin of life: liquid water has been present at the surface of the Earth; the ozone layer in the atmosphere has protected life from dangerous solar radiation; and the climate has remained within comfortable bounds in spite of the constantly increasing luminosity of the Sun. Compared to the inferno of Venus or the freezer of Mars, Earth has always provided a paradise for life in the solar system, and perhaps in the universe. Whenever fluctuations have occurred, or more dramatic perturbation events took place, such as a meteorite strike in the late Cretaceous or massive volcanic eruptions in the late Permian, life has persisted: former species disappeared, but new ones, with different environmental needs and strategies, emerged. Over the ages, the parameters necessary for life — free energy, abundance of water, pH, pressure, temperature — have remained within the same broad range. In this familiar story, geology has provided a stage, independent of life’s activities, to which life’s only duty is to adapt. Earth has been made already habitable by geology. To be sure, some biologists did tell us that local environments can be changed by life — algae can change the chemical composition of a pond, termites can build mounds, and beavers can build dams and change the flow of rivers — but the Earth itself — the atmosphere, the oceans, the crust — is nothing more than the external framework inside which life has to fit. There are two things in this story that seem very odd. The first is that it transforms the continuity and development of Life on Earth (see Dutreuil, “Gaia Is Alive,” this volume, xx–xx) into the result of a miraculous harmony. By chance, or should we say, by providential foresight, geology has made itself “just perfect” as a paradise of organisms. But who created this paradise? Is there a mysterious power above Earth and Life? It is strange that such a miracle could have passed for a scientific argument … The second feature is even stranger: if you consider the metabolism of any organism — for instance, one of those termites inside their termite mounds — it’s clear that it keeps taking in the chemical compounds on which it thrives, and excreting other chemical waste products. So, any observer of life forms will be tempted to follow the precise data cited here are to be long trail of transformations that

1 All references to found in Timothy M. Lenton, Sébastien Dutreuil, and Bruno Latour, “Life on Earth Is Hard to Spot,” The Anthropocene Review (forthcoming). To learn more about the figures listed here, see also Timothy Lenton, Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Timothy M. Lenton and Andrew Watson, Revolutions That Made the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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metabolism leaves behind — which provides new conditions for other life forms to sustain their own existence. No organism simply sits in its surroundings; it metamorphoses them, so that the organism ends up fully entangled in the consequences of the metabolism of its predecessors, thus creating a cascade of modifications. If we follow the cascade far and long enough, the idea that an organism resides in an untouched environment becomes ridiculous: what surrounds an organism are all the chemical transformations generated by all the other organisms living before and alongside it. Habitability is a joint venture (Lenton and Dutreuil, “Distinguishing Gaia from the Earth System(s),” this volume, xx–xx). The question becomes how long and how far are you prepared to go: one termite, one termite mound, many termite mounds? Well, it turns out that going far and staying awake long enough to do so is the only way to contest the providential account and a fairly good way to respect the specific agency of life forms. On one condition: that you don’t jump too quickly to give a precise role to the agent on stage. Please accept not knowing what sort of character it is, and let it be defined not by what it is (or rather what you wrongly believe it is) but by what it does. To make sure we don’t mischaracterize this agent, let’s simply call it X. The following is a provisional list of what X does. X Keeps the Atmosphere Out of Equilibrium

THE PROVIDENTIAL STORY will have you believe that by an incredible chance the atmospheric composition of gases is just what is needed for life to thrive. It turns out that the atmosphere today is composed of 78% nitrogen (N2), 21% dioxygen (O2), only 0.04% carbon dioxide (CO2), and minor but very chemically significant amounts of methane, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and other biogenic gases.1 James Lovelock is one scientist who found such a story difficult to swallow, and for a good, hard chemical reason: methane and oxygen cannot sit together without reacting (methane with oxygen would produce CO2 and water). So, Lovelock asked his geological colleagues: How do you explain that the concentration of methane in this oxygen-rich atmosphere is a factor of ~1030 greater than expected at equilibrium? How can this state so far from equilibrium be

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Age (Myr ago) Fig. 1: Atmospheric oxygen regulation over Phanerozoic time. Results from the COPSE model. The figure shows the long-term stability of atmospheric oxygen, it predicts that oxygen remained within 17–30% of the atmosphere over the last 350 million years, consistent with the record of charcoal and forests. It predicts 5–10% atmospheric oxygen prior to the rise of plants, due to a weaker source of phosphorus (slower rock weathering) and a lower carbon-to-phosphorus burial ratio.

maintained through time? An estimated ~0.7 TW (the equivalent of around seven hundred nuclear power plants) is required just to maintain the O2–CH4 coexistence. The answer is easy to find and no one disagreed with the result: the methane in the atmosphere is the product of some of the oldest organisms on the planet that we now call archaea, and the oxygen is almost entirely produced by cyanobacteria, algae, and plants in the process of (oxygenic) photosynthesis. Without them, surface concentrations of oxygen would be around 1 part in 1012 (1,000,000,000,000) of the atmosphere, rather than 1 part in 5. Production of oxygen by Life (~1016 molO2/yr) is over 4 orders of magnitude (10,000) larger than from purely physical and chemical processes (~4×1011 molO2/yr). Thus, while the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is massive (3.7×1019 mol), it is all processed through life forms roughly once every four thousand years. So here is a nice case of life forms breathing what is in effect the excretion of other life forms. Oxygen is to organisms what the termite mound is to all the beings inside it: not an “environment,” but the byproduct of other organisms inside which they find themselves entangled.

Another byproduct that the providential story takes as a given is the protective ozone layer itself, since it is fairly obvious that without abundant dioxygen (O2) there would be no ozone (O3) and no ozone layer. It is an entirely biological product that surrounds all life forms, offering a sort of protecting envelope that is under the control of the life forms themselves. The comparison is even more striking when the amount of oxygen is taken into account. If there is too much oxygen, everything burns; too little, every aerobic organism dies. And yet oxygen has always remained within 17–25% of the atmosphere for the last 350 million years (see fig. 1). There must be something counteracting changes in oxygen level. In one incarnation of this adjustment, fires suppress vegetation and transfer phosphorus from the land to the ocean, where less oxygen is produced per atom of phosphorus. In a different variant, fires suppressing vegetation also suppress phosphorus weathering, thus limiting oxygen production. Whatever the exact model, we have to consider that what appears as “outside” — the atmospheric conditions of all other life forms — is, strangely enough, “inside” some sort of envelope, what we call, for want of a better term, a feedback.

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Although everyone today is rightly concerned by the amount of CO2 released by human industry, what is rather extraordinary — but not miraculous! — is actually its scarcity. It’s another key feature of the disequilibrium of Earth’s atmosphere when compared to Mars and Venus, which have atmospheres dominated by CO2 (see fig. 2).If the atmosphere were just a stage offered to the actions of organisms, atmospheric CO2 would be an estimated ~10– to 100–fold higher. Here again, a feedback is visible where life forms, over billions of years, have turned CO2 from a dominant component of the atmosphere to a trace gas. Firstly, they have locked up organic carbon in sedimentary rocks, including the vast quantities of coal and oil that are the remnants of past living organisms. Secondly, they have accelerated the weathering of continental silicate rocks, like granite, and combined the alkaline ions (Ca2+, Mg2+) thus liberated with CO2 to form new carbonate sediments ((Ca,Mg)CO3) — locking up atmospheric CO2. This is what makes the providential story so improbable: without the very activity of life forms, Earth’s atmosphere would be closer to chemical equilibrium, much richer in CO2, would contain barely any O2, and would even have greater atmospheric pressure because living beings have progressively locked up its main constituent, N2. A story using geology as a stable frame for organisms that do nothing in it would mean only one thing: planet Earth would be simply uninhabitable, just as Venus and Mars are. Organisms have given a new twist to the saying “God (or rather Geology) helps only those who help themselves.”

X Is Not Very Visible and Has a Strange Way of Looking Big

DON’ T FORGET THAT the only way to escape the providential story is not to jump too fast to a conclusion and shout: “I know who the culprit is!” This is not a whodunit. And for one good reason: when we suggest that organisms have played this role in creating the livable conditions of their successors, the risk is that readers will imagine that these organisms are amazingly powerful and fully united as one single agent. None of this is true. Again, no Providential God/Geology is at work. The proof is that, if we collect elementary numbers to give some scale to the activity of life forms compared to those attributed to the activity of the Sun, the life forms appear to have a minuscule presence. It’s convenient to give a scale of the life forms’ activity by measuring it in terawatts (TW), much as we do when measuring a power plant. (To give an idea of the scale, humans run their civilization at around 17 TW and mantle convection is driven by an estimated 12 TW.) To put this in context, the total free energy input or power supply for organisms is ~264 TW. But this is nothing compared to the radiative energy balance of the planet, which absorbs ~120,000 TW, ~80,000 TW of which is at the surface. In their 4.5 billion years of history, organisms managed to capture through photosynthesis only about 1% of the solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface, and to convert only ~0.3% into usable chemical energy. Around half of this is respired by

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the photosynthesizing organisms, and the other half provides food supply (net primary production) to all the other life forms. So, however you imagine X to act, don’t grant it too grandiose a role. Organisms don’t occupy all the stage. Put together, their 264 TW are of a comparable magnitude to the ~900 TW power supply available from atmospheric circulation and run at least at three times the surface power supply from Earth’s internal heat source. If nonetheless, life forms have managed to have the effects mentioned earlier, you have to imagine that they have spread “everywhere” in time and space but in a very odd manner, much like a network, impressive by its extension, not by its surface. Such an original way of playing a role is even more striking when considering that, according to the providential story, Earth is not even able to provide enough elements for organisms to survive on. What a strange sort of Providence: left to its original frame, organisms would be famished! They are composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous, and minor quantities of other elements. The inputs of these essential elements to the Earth’s surface are generally meager compared to their total requirements. Thus, they had to devise ways to artificially increase the inputs of the essential elements they need. The solution resembles the tactic of film directors wanting to shoot a whole battle scene on a tight budget: they have to ask the same actors to pass by many times over to give the impression of a large crowd. This is called recycling: the waste of one metabolism is the food of another.

We begin to grasp the source of the efficiency of life forms when we compare the disproportion between the amount of ingredients available at the start and the immensely larger amount organisms have access to today. The difference between the two figures gives a rough idea of the number of times the same element is being recycled. In the end, the lone actor has indeed become an army! The measure is given here in the number of atoms (moles) available per year. Carbon is the backbone of life’s chemistry: photosynthesis reduces atmospheric CO2 into organic matter, and respiration releases it back to the atmosphere. These biological fluxes of carbon (~1016 molC/yr today) are around four hundred times larger than the inputs/outputs of carbon to/from the solid Earth (~2.7×1013 molC/yr). Nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere but in a nearly inert form (N2). Yet, certain bacteria can nonetheless split N2 and fix nitrogen into organic matter (at great energetic cost). The resulting supply flux (~1.5×1013 molN/yr) of biologically available nitrogen (NO3– and NH4+) is around forty times the abiotic source from lightning strikes (~0.35×1012 molN yr–1). Nitrogen uptake in net primary production (~1.5×1015 molN/yr) is a further one hundred times larger indicating organisms recycle nitrogen around a hundred times before denitrification returns it to the atmosphere, or it is buried in sediments. Organisms are responsible for all the key transformations in the nitrogen cycle (see fig. 3), making it an essentially biological cycle.

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WHAT EXACTLY IS THE ROLE OF GAIA?

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Fig. 4: The phosphorous cycle.

Phosphorus has no significant gaseous form; its abundance in the crust is modest, and biologically available phosphorus all ultimately derives from continental chemical weathering (see fig. 4). Phosphorus is preferentially weathered, relative to the bulk rock matrix, by biological innovations including organic acid production and selective dissolution of P-rich mineral inclusions (apatite) in rocks. Conceivably, organisms at least double the bio-available phosphorus input (~4×1010 molP/yr). Still, phosphorus uptake in net primary production (~5×1013 molP/ yr) is more than one thousand times larger, indicating a corresponding global recycling ratio, higher than that of nitrogen and consistent with the accepted notion that phosphorus is the “ultimate limiting nutrient.” Sulfur is widely used by Life in varying and remarkably poorly known proportions, with C:S ranging over ~50–200 for marine phytoplankton, and up to ~300–600 for terrestrial plants. The corresponding uptake of sulfur in net primary production (~(0.3–1.2)×1014 molS/yr) is ~10–40 times the supply (~3.2×1012 molS/yr) from the solid Earth. If organisms had not twisted the system to “help themselves” against the miserly allocation granted them by the providential story, the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur within the surface system would be small. With recycling, however, organisms have increased their total productivity by

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at least a thousand-fold more. This is why the role of X is so difficult to pinpoint: on the one hand it’s nothing, but on the other it’s amazingly big. X Expands Its Control Quite Far

IF WE FOLLOW the cascade of metabolism far and long enough, we begin to suspect that what the providential story takes as its starting point — Earth’s habitability provided by water and geology — might actually not be a given at all. Once again, most of the activity attributed to the outside framework might be the result of those very organisms which were supposed to simply “adapt to their environment.” This is probably the case for the major condition of existence, namely water. Who or what is doing the job of keeping it in place? By some estimates, an Earth without Life (and its lowering of CO2) would be very close to — and might already have passed — the threshold of having a “moist greenhouse” (pressure-cooker) atmosphere — with surface temperatures >50 °C. In this runaway transition, increased water vapor in the atmosphere traps more heat radiation, further increasing water vapor. The wet atmosphere would then lose its water — through hydrogen loss to space — ultimately making the planet uninhabitable. Organisms have also helped retain water by producing

TIMOTHY M. LENTON AND SÉBASTIEN DUTREUIL

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Sedimentary carbonates (CO3) 5 × 1021 mol

Fig. 5: The carbon cycle – showing both short-term surface cycling (bigger arrows) and long-term exchange with the crust (smaller arrows), together with major anthropogenic fluxes (dashed arrows).

the oxygen-rich atmosphere, the ozone layer, and the resulting strong thermal stratification of the “stratosphere,” which creates an effective “cold trap” at the tropopause that prevents water from reaching the upper atmosphere where it can be split apart and its hydrogen lost to space. Thus, water is not just “there”; it is kept in place by life forms. The same misattribution of agency might have occurred about the rock framework implied in the canonical story. Organisms seem to have an uncanny ability to make their own rock as well as to keep their water and provide their own atmospheric conditions. It is well known that many rocks are biological products, such as the white chalk cliffs of south England and northern France, and limestone more generally. In fact, a large fraction of the diversity of Earth’s 4,300 minerals are either biologically precipitated or require oxygen (a biological product) in their creation and hence would not exist without life forms. Since they have spread over all of Earth’s surfaces, living things have affected the surface color and reflectivity (albedo) and hence affected the total amount of solar radiation absorbed at the surface. Vegetation generally lowers land surface albedo, particularly in the boreal high latitudes. Phytoplankton in the upper layer of Earth’s oceans generally lower ocean surface albedo. So, without such life forms, Earth’s surface would be paler and different in color. Clouds, in contrast, would be darker.

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE ROLE OF GAIA?

Overall the planet would probably be less reflective, and there would probably be less aerosol scattering by the atmosphere — meaning less dramatic sunsets! This is how X manages to expand everywhere while not being very easy to spot. There is nothing miraculous in this alternative story; you just have to pursue longer and in vaster aggregates what is so clearly visible at a smaller scale and for a limited range of organisms. For example, just as plants have contributed over hundreds of millions of years to maintaining the overall conditions in which they could thrive, over a shorter period of time, living beings can also contribute to regulating the climate and to maintaining their own conditions of existence. It is very well known that there would not be enough rain to maintain the Amazon rainforest without the actions of the forest itself: through evapotranspiration, bringing soil water up into the atmosphere, the Amazon rainforest contributes to maintaining the precipitation it needs to thrive. In the long run, therefore, plants have not adapted to a given climate: they have contributed to maintaining a climate in which they can persist. It has also been argued that planktonic calcifying organisms — the ones that produced the carbonate shells that made limestone cliffs — have stabilized the carbon cycle (see fig. 5) by buffering the carbonate-ion concentration in the oceans. Their evolution during the Phanerozoic may thus have prevented the

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Surface temperature

Sea-ice cover

Reflection of sunlight

Fig. 6: The ice-albedo positive feedback. To get from the present climate state to the snowball Earth state involves a particularly strong positive feedback mechanism, known as the ice-albedo feedback. The key idea is that ice and snow are highly reflective (high albedo) to sunlight. Like all positive feedback mechanisms, the ice-albedo feedback can amplify climate change in either direction; either cooling (with increasing ice cover) or warming (with decreasing ice cover). The feedback operates on today’s Earth, with its relatively small ice caps at each pole. However, the feedback gets stronger if the planet cools and ice cover increases. This is because the ice is spreading over a sphere into lower latitudes, where there is more incoming solar radiation. As ice reaches to lower lati-

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tudes, a given perturbation in temperature can cause a larger incremental change in the area of ice cover, a greater increase in reflection of sunlight, and a correspondingly larger amplification of the temperature change. If the ice line reaches roughly 30 degrees in latitude – the tropics – the feedback gets so strong that it “runs away.” This means that any additional tiny cooling will cause an increase in ice cover and associated cooling that is as large as (or larger than) the initial perturbation. This produces an even larger increase in ice cover, and so on, until the ice snaps shut at the equator creating a “snowball Earth.” (Quoted from Timothy M. Lenton, Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9f.)

return of catastrophic “snowball Earth” events that occurred as well as negative — for its successors and partners. Each modearlier in Earth’s history — in which the entire surface of the ifies the habitability range of the others. Although this is easy to Earth was frozen over. All of this is supported by recent mod- follow at the local level — termites produce their own termite eling that has captured the interacting effects of water vapor, mound environments — a split has occurred among scientists CO2, and N2, which suggests the “habitable zone” would be dis- when they study things at larger scales: then, they strangely sepappearing in the absence of the organisms that have broadened arate what organisms have done and where they live. Hence the it considerably. appeal to a providential harmony to reconvene the two. More fundamentally, organisms may have altered even the To avoid such a reliance on Providence, it is sufficient to folplanet’s rock cycle. They clearly have the energetic potential to low the cascade of entangled organisms as far and as long as do so since, as we saw, the current power supply of Life (264 possible. Then, habitability, far from providing a given frameTW) exceeds the power driving mantle convection (~12 TW) by work, turns out to be the partial product of all its inhabitants. a factor >20, and that driving crust cycling (26 TW) by a factor Taken together, life forms can be called “Life” with a capital L of ~10. It also exceeds the work done by the atmospheric heat (see Dutreuil, “Gaia Is Alive,” this volume, xx–xx), which inengine in physical weathering (