Author: Kathleen Swain

Note: I wrote the original version of this essay in 2021 for the undergraduate English course English 400: History of Literary Criticism with Dr. Jeffrey Timmons at ASU.

In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon identifies what he calls “slow violence,” a type of violence that works “across a range of temporal scales” and that “occurs gradually and out of sight” (2356). He aligns his definition with the examples of “long dyings” from war and climate, and asserts that slow violence is especially insidious as it resists our “degraded attention spans,” worsened by “digitally speeded up time, and foreshortened narrative” (Nixon 2356, 2365). Nixon seems to see contemporary humanity’s understanding of traumatic and violent events as a swift punctuated equilibrium, with most people unable, or unwilling, to see the constant but often immediately invisible destruction that takes years, decades, centuries, or even epochs to accumulate. Nixon also assesses the problem of capturing the public’s attention upon such “slow” ecological disasters, focusing upon the positive role of “writer-activists” in resolving this problem (2368).

The nineteen-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg, however, shows how communication outside of Nixon’s slow media of writing can make the urgency of prolonged climate change emotionally available to a general audience. In her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, given when she was sixteen, Thunberg embodies the violence of anthropogenic climate change with her defiant voice and dynamic face as she calls out leaders for their “empty words” and impotent solutions (0:58). Though Thunberg utilizes what Nixon describes as the “sensory apprehension” of sight, she also undermines his focus upon stories as a solution and shows the potential for activism within intergenerational power structures (2367). Thunberg’s speech combines these approaches to demonstrate a compressed rhetoric of Nixon’s slow violence by condensing the long-term effects of climate change to better match the emotional abruptness of present media and bridging a crucial temporal communication gap.

In Slow Violence, Nixon argues that protracted problems such as climate change may be communicated through “[t]he narrative imaginings of writer-activists” giving “figurative shape to formless threats” made distant “across space and time” (2368, 2363). Problems such as climate change, he argues, lack the visceral shock that fuels media and promotes change, and they must rely upon creative storytelling to make an impact (Nixon 2367-2368). Thunberg, however, undercuts Nixon’s idea as she derides current climate leaders’ “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” and their “empty words” (0:54-1:22). For her, stories obscure the truth of “mass extinction” and the suffering caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide (Thunberg 1:13). Thunberg argues that, rather than bringing issues forward, as Nixon asserts, stories create euphemisms that lull the public into a satisfied inaction. Her reference to “fairy tales” reframes narratives as wishful thinking rooted in dangerous imagination, distracting from the true solution of action. Thunberg’s medium of speech intersects with her disgust over the hollowness of words, placing a sense of sound, voice, and gesture over the perilous mollification of writing and reading. Her urgent voice brings Nixon’s celebration of slow media into question, showing that the shock of fast-paced platforms is, in fact, applicable to slow violence.

In focusing on the problem of concretizing slow violence, Nixon also argues for translating such environmental problems into “immediate sensory apprehension,” especially the sense of sight (2367). Thunberg exhibits how this trope of sight can be applied to climate activism by turning her audience’s vision from environmental degradation to the perpetrators of said degradation themselves, beginning her speech by stating that her “message is that we’ll be watching you” (0:25-0:28). Rather than using sight to show images of climate change, or to present impersonal slides of charts and ostensible solutions—all approaches which have thus far proven ineffective in significantly slowing global warming—Thunberg directly addresses her audience as the origin of such slow violence. Specifically, Thunberg accuses climate leaders of “failing us” and, turning again to sight, threatens that “[t]he eyes of all future generations are upon you” (4:10-4:27). Thunberg’s use of “eyes” and “watching” brings a moral aspect to the discussion that otherwise passive “seeing” ignores. Such a technique may be more effective than showing images of climate change or sterile projections, as morality—here, the sense of being watched and judged—is more likely to create an emotional response. As Nixon discusses, such emotionality contributes to the gap between proximally violent acts and the distance of slow violence (2361-2362). But, again, while Nixon criticizes this dichotomy as part of the larger structure of “our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment,” Thunberg uses it to exploit human nature, understanding that while most scientific issues are abstract, the ignorance and violence of people is something we can all understand (2362). By targeting people through sight—“watching” them with the younger generation’s “eyes”—Thunberg creates a comprehensible, concrete enemy. And, even when coming from a child, no one wishes to have such condemnatory eyes upon them.

Thunberg embodies the violence of anthropogenic climate change with her defiant voice and dynamic face as she calls out leaders for their “empty words” and impotent solutions.

In his analysis of slow violence, Nixon also notes the social context of environmental issues, commenting on “the poor” and “resource rebels” in developing countries (2357). Moreover, he brings in the larger identity politics of “ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion and generation” (Nixon 2357). That final category—generation—applies well to Thunberg and her role as a youth activist. In her UN speech, Thunberg turns to the culturally mediated contradictions inherent in youth activism as an advantage for the dissolution of the youth-adult power imbalance. Thunberg identifies herself with “us young people” whose futures and “dreams” have been “stolen” through the greed and ignorance of current adults who, as Nixon notes, put off solutions as problems for the next generation (0:48-0:55; 2362). Thunberg’s word choice—“stolen”—splits generations into criminals and victims, appealing to an accessible binary. Yet, Thunberg also emphasizes her disbelief that adults are “evil,” claiming instead that they are simply ignorant (1:29-1:44). Such an evaluation, simple and disciplined in its forgiveness, parodies the trope of adult wisdom, placing power within youth. Thunberg also takes advantage of her oxymoronic status as a youth activist by accusing the adults around her of hiding facts, declaring that “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is” (4:05-4:08). Her activism, in the usually disempowered role of a girl, calls out slow violence by crossing generational lines, taking her own contradictions and creating a new one in the form of immature authority. With this, Thunberg destabilizes the power structures around her. Such a destabilization, in encouraging focus because of its unconventionality, makes sharp, and visible, the imminence of climate change’s not-so-slow consequences.

The effect of Thunberg’s rhetoric, both aligning with and undermining Nixon’s approach, is to compress and condense the slow violence of climate change to match the present. Instead of capitulating to the contemporary media environment, and instead of turning to more abstract story-based writing, as Nixon proposes, Thunberg uses shock, sight, and youth as weapons against a culture that perpetuates distinctions and divisions. Doing so closes the temporal unreality of extended trauma, not only making the past not past, as Nixon alludes, but the future not future; the next generation is not silent, but angry, shouting, and here (2361). Thunberg gives the next biggest victims of climate change—her generation—a say against slow violence, collapsing the generational divide and making environmental destruction real and complementary to a media milieu of instant gratification and clickbait. Just as compression makes audio louder, Thunberg’s contraction of slow violence only makes her generation’s voice stronger and more potent.

This is not to say that Nixon has environmental activism wrong. His term slow violence carefully delineates a violence of “delayed destruction” that time and attention otherwise bury or lump in with all general modern problems (Nixon 2356). Using his framework makes this difference understandable, and only with knowledge can we effect true change. As well, his focuses on the sense of sight and on societal power structures provide context to activism in all forms, not just the writing that he focuses upon. Nixon misses, however, the opportunity to use the biggest obstacle to an understanding of slow violence—time—as an advantage, something that Thunberg does by literally making physical the next generation in her own powerful anger. As well, Nixon’s insistence upon calling “writer-activists” the saviors of slow violence ignores more subversive activist roles such as youth activism. He places too much emphasis upon the capacity of storytelling to incite people to action instead of considering the potential for fast media to be a benefit, rather than a detriment, to environmentalist movements—the main video of Thunberg’s speech on YouTube, posted by PBS NewsHour, has garnered over 5.3 million views, a testament to the power of quick clips and shareable content.

As a theoretical concept, slow violence also does not take into consideration the relativity of slowness. Nixon equates environmental disasters such as “massing greenhouse gases” and “accelerated species loss” with largely indefinite conceptions of time, only acknowledging fast-paced violence in the context of “rapid modifications to the human cortex” (2357, 2365). Thunberg’s emphasis on impending action—she states the “[t]he world is waking up,” and that “change is coming”—belies Nixon’s portrayal of contemporary minds unable to see beyond the short term (4:17-4:21). With her focus on shifting people’s temporal assumptions, Thunberg makes Nixon’s dismay of recent generations appear unfair and too narrowly negative. While Nixon seems to operate based upon fear and cynicism, Thunberg manifests anger, hope, and a flexibility that is, in some ways, incongruent with the idea of slow violence. Despite these issues, Nixon’s naming of environmental attrition works well as a defining term, re-presenting persistent problems. A unique term, slow violence provides global warming and other ecological issues the semantic edge they need to enter into contemporary public consciousness during an era where the word “change” is not enough, and violence is all too present.

Works Cited

Nixon, Rob. “Introduction” from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 2355-2368.

Thunberg, Greta. “WATCH: Greta Thunberg’s full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit.” YouTube, uploaded by PBS NewsHour, 23 Sept. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAJsdgTPJpU.

Note: I wrote the original version of this essay in January of this year for the graduate course English 504: Posthumanism with Dr. Jason Bryant at ASU on the topic of Donna Haraway’s book When Species Meet.

I want to start from Donna Haraway’s fascination with etymologies, and lead this into taking the title of her book, When Species Meet, seriously regarding the concept of “species.” As Haraway notes, “[c]ompanion comes from the Latin cum panis, ‘with bread’” (17). Companions are those who eat together, who share tables, who interweave and make each other through relationships and processes, entanglements with “partners [who] do not preexist their constitutive intra-action” (Haraway 32). She finds most delight in dogs, though other “animals” (I invoke Jacques Derrida’s skepticism) make an appearance. But back to the root: cum panis. Perhaps one imagines friends gathered at a table, sharing nourishment and conversation, furtive (or not) passing of scraps to a companion dog. Relations flow between these beings, all the connections and kin makings that Haraway delights in. But what of the bread itself? Made of wheat or other grains, food for many, I argue that we must consider this“kind” too. Plants make a limited appearance in Haraway’s book, coming alive mostly through the Canis-morphic “Jim’s Dog” (5-6). I argue that plants, too, deserve a seat at the table, and as more than objectified food. How to incorporate plants into the species part of Haraway’s “companion species,” given the word “species’” own root tied to “look[ing]” and “behold[ing],” may prove difficult for beings without eyes (potatoes forgiven for their transgression) (Haraway 17). Here, I will try to make comparisons for the sake of a generative discourse with Haraway’s concepts in order to explore whether plants can truly hold their own with animals as companion species.

Considering plants, or their mistaken cousins, fungi, as companion species, explicit or not, is certainly not without precedent. Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire and Anna Tsing’s paper “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species” come to mind. As Tsing argues, “[c]ereals domesticated humans” (145; italics removed). According to her, the difficulty, rather than convenience, of cultivating wheat and barley over harvesting wild varieties allowed “social hierarchies” and “the state” to emerge and enforce patriarchal standards (Tsing 146). In essence, grains made us who and how we are at least as much as dogs have. Now I want to turn back to the sight-based root of “species.” Haraway writes an incisive criticism of Derrida and his cat, noting the difference between the cat looking back and the philosopher failing to think of “how to look back” and how to engender a responsive relationship with the cat (19-25; italics removed). In short, she criticizes Derrida for not recognizing, as she writes later, “the obligation to respond” (Haraway 80). In this case an “intersecting gaze” would have paved the way for true multi-species companionship, an “entanglement” that may not always be equal, but at least contains some core of trying to understand (Haraway 21, 20). How can this be for plants? Imagine if Derrida had walked into that bathroom on that morning and had seen his beloved houseplant. It is awfully hard to think of the plant looking back. Still, maybe the plant would have brown or wilting leaves, clearly a sign of distress. Derrida could have gone to the sink, poured some water in a cup, and tried to honor the plant’s distress signals. Would that count as response? Could Derrida feel shame in front of a plant? Even if he could, would that be a relationship with somebody, or something? Haraway implies that having a “face” means being “somebody” alongside being “something,” but plants don’t have faces or any other clearly recognizable sensory organs (76). How does one respond to something without a face?

Maybe touch will help sort things out. Haraway mentions “touch” as a part of “becoming with” (36). Certainly a human can touch a plant and a plant can touch a human (or any other being, for that matter). But are there implications in Haraway’s thoughts? She writes that “[t]hey touch; therefore they are” (Haraway 263). Of course, this is in the context of animals, but I think it holds. To further this idea, it might be good to look at a plant that has long enthralled people: Mimosa pudica. Also known as the sensitive plant, Mimosa responds to touch by curling its leaves in a remarkably short amount of time (Gagliano and Marder). As Monica Gagliano and Michael Marder write in an article for Botany One—critical plant studies is an emerging field with a small amount of scholarship—Mimosa at Kew Gardens “no longer curl up to the nudging fingers of countless human visitors” (para. 4). These Mimosa have learned, and they have done so through touch and response. Before getting too excited, however, it’s important to extrapolate Haraway’s warning that “resistance to human exceptionalism requires resistance to humanization” (52). While Mimosa do show, I believe, plants as “somebody,” they may better be seen as an anthropomorphic lure. Many have fallen into the trap—see, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s quite animate and thoughtful “The Sensitive Plant.” We seem to love what is like us, and timely response fits. Focusing on Mimosa means entrenching ourselves further into the Humanist ideals that Haraway’s notion of companion species tries to resist. But even with other plants we just can’t help ourselves. Think, for example, of William Wordsworth’s “fluttering,” “dancing” daffodils, “tossing their heads” (6, 12). These flowers have faces, but are they not ours?

There are other issues too, the most problematic being Haraway’s ideas of play and suffering. Haraway describes play as something that “brings us into the open” and can lead to “joy” (237). Despite all of Wordsworth’s poetry, I cannot convince myself that we can play with plants, and that plants can play with us. The problem of suffering offers more traction. As Haraway notes, “[t]here is no way to eat and not to kill” (295). This implicates plants within the potential for suffering and “nonmimetic sharing” (Haraway 75). In response to the uncomfortable situation of suffering that we cannot literally share, Haraway suggests avoiding notions of sacrifice and instead learning to respond, ending up at the point of refusing “to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not”: “Thou Shalt not make killable” (79, 80). As Haraway uses the word “beings,” I’ll assume that plants fall under this maxim’s ethical purview. That also means acknowledging the suffering, however it is, of plants. Whether or not they feel pain (can we even make that equivalence?), I think we owe plants response, and in that response a responsibility for our cross-species interactions emerges. Cum panis takes on a cannibalistic undertone from this point of view, with all life forms consuming and using one another— “indigestion” indeed (Haraway 292)!

How do we make kin in a relationship this messy? To take Haraway’s approach, we should not only look—regard—but respond with the “risky obligation of curiosity,” learning to become worldly in the process (287, 3). With such complexity we may also learn even more acutely what it takes to “become with” (Haraway 3). So, are plants companion species? Haraway makes few if any sweeping statements in her book, substituting the goal of a unified theory for fluxes and specifics; “becoming” happens in the details. As well, she writes that “we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary” (Haraway 3). Haraway’s focus on animals does not preclude plants from being a part of meeting species. Even if looking, touch, play, and suffering don’t fit, plants still shape us, and we shape them. So yes, plants are companion species with all the wonderful potentialities that recognition comes with. It’s companion species all the way down, cum panis to the root.

Works Cited

Gagliano, Monica, and Michael Marder. “What a Plant Learns. A Curious Case of Mimosa pudica.” Botany One, 2019, philosoplant.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=308. Accessed 19 Jan. 2022.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Tsing, Anna. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 1, 2012, pp. 141-154. doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012.

Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Poetry Foundation, 2022, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud. Accessed 19 Jan. 2022.

Note: I wrote the original version of this essay in 2021 for the graduate course English 598: Environmental Humanities with Dr. Joni Adamson at ASU.

Among the cacophony of heterogenous discourse that surrounds the term “the Anthropocene,” there rests a theme of dualistic otherness: oppressed and oppressor, nature-culture, and the human and nonhuman, to identify a few (Antadze 40-41; Rocheleau and Nirmal 51-52; Crist 133). The proposed epoch of the Anthropocene, which accounts for “human-driven” global geophysical changes, extracts humanity from the fold of geological time, balancing the future on our ability to complicate the subject-other division and work towards a more ecologically minded reinterpretation (Zalasiewicz et al. 14). Scholar Timothy Morton attempts such a redefinition with what he calls the “strange stranger,” an ecological rendering of the “other” that accounts for the uncanny, the subversive, and entangled intimacy (40-58). Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild explores such concepts as it follows residents of the Bathtub, a fictionalized island community south of Louisiana’s levees, as they cope with the effects of the Anthropocene. Through their perilous journey, protagonists Hushpuppy and her father Wink confront the strange stranger in their encounters with petroleum refineries, the ocean, and animals. Morton’s concept of the uncanny, subversive, and intimate strange stranger helps to explain how Beasts of the Southern Wild represents the Anthropocene’s redefinition of othering and otherness.

One of the most striking scenes in Beasts of the Southern Wild occurs as six-year-old Hushpuppy and her father Wink look upon an industrial shore lined with petroleum refineries (Beasts 4:03-4:53). This scene splits the landscape into two sections, the glassy water that the two characters rest upon in their boat on the right, and the desolate shore with a dull, gray sky and white clouds billowing from the factories on the left. While Hushpuppy and Wink raise contextual representations of the “other” in terms of environmental (in)justice—their location and situation mirror Louisiana’s “cancer alley” and the “sacrifice zones” that trade in community wellness for the monstrous business of oil—Zeitlin also uses this scene to explore ideas of the subversive and the uncanny (Emmett and Nye 172-173). While watching the shore, Wink expresses his disdain: “Ain’t that ugly over there?” (Beasts 4:26-4:28). His voice, contrasted with the silence of the refineries, subversively frames the industrial waterfront as “other.” Contrary to the cultural narrative that forces residents of the Bathtub as other, here Wink and Hushpuppy see the petroleum industry, rather than themselves, as a strange stranger. Myriad threatening concrete reinforcements hold the land from the water in an uncanny display of repetition, and yet a toxic intimacy remains as factory clouds spill into a shared airspace and pollution leaches into the water (Morton 53). Even more, the characters sit in a boat made from the bed of a gas-fueled pickup truck, a silent protestation that calls attention to barriers between industry and victim and prophesies the relegation of big oil and its products to future relics. This scene shows how strange strangers converge in the Anthropocene and face each other in complex, subversive, and permeable ways that undermine traditional conceptions of the “other,” a term that, as Val Plumwood notes, artificially simplifies relationships to the standard of subjugation (Emmett and Nye 153-154). In this Anthropocene world, strange strangers exist as nodes of connection and subversion rather than distance.

In Beasts of the Southern Wild, however, such strange strangers also lie closer to home for residents of the Bathtub. At the beginning of the film, Hushpuppy watches over a pile of writhing fish, crab, and other seafood, and places a crab up to her ear, listening to its heartbeat (Beasts 6:27-7:00). Zeitlin places this scene within a montage of the Bathtub, set to upbeat music, that represents the Delta community as festive, joyous, independent, alive, and abundant (Beasts 5:00-8:13). This contrasts with a scene later in the film, after a storm hits the Bathtub—a storm that parallels Hurricane Katrina and recalls anthropogenic climate change—and floods the island (Beasts 44:27-46:22). Here, the Anthropocene transforms the sea from kin to killer. The salt water, once so bountiful and giving, strangles vegetation, shown as the camera pauses on uncanny rows of leafless branches that reach into a sallow sky (Beasts 44:33-44:36). Zeitlin also undermines this good-bad dichotomy, however, in two earlier scenes that show glaciers calving into the sea and releasing from the ice an ancient beast known as the aurochs, a testament to long-term climate change (Beasts 29:06-29:11, 9:42-9:58). This contrast, like the Anthropocene itself, displaces humanity’s typical notions of “time and space,” showing that while locally the sea has suddenly transformed into an “other” for residents of the Bathtub, within the span of geological time the ocean has always been a strange stranger, intimate and destructive at once as it freezes and melts, floods and provides (Emmett and Nye 16). With this subversion of time scales, Beasts of the Southern Wild shows how the rapid rate of change in the Anthropocene destabilizes any clear-cut notions of black and white and reorients our ideas of what constitutes good and bad, other and familiar, as the sea ebbs and flows between and among such designations.

This reorientation of the other works most clearly within the film’s focus on animals. The film begins by showing Hushpuppy demonstrating her unique ecological awareness of the nonhuman as she places chickens next to her ear, listening to their fast “hearts…beating and squirting and talking to each other the ways I can’t understand” (Beasts 2:26-2:48). Immediately after this scene, however, we see Wink placing a chicken carcass on the grill (Beasts 3:20-3:24). This highlights a contrast that runs throughout the movie, one that threads together the complexity of otherness: What is an animal in the Anthropocene? Is it food for the grill, or is it a creature with a heart like ours? Are we all just “meat, meat, meat,” as Miss Bathsheba claims, or are we family, operating cannibalistically as a living whole, eating each other up (Beasts 8:14-8:41)? Is the uncanny repetition of heartbeats—shared and separate at once—a sign of life, or a sign of death in this new epoch? Near the end of the film, when Hushpuppy faces the aurochs, now thawed from the ice and roaming freely in the Bathtub, she reaches towards their giant bodies and proclaims that “[y]ou’re my friend, kind of” (Beasts 1:21:21-1:22:43). Her admission—“kind of”—summarizes the convergence of the strange stranger that the Anthropocene engenders. Hushpuppy recognizes that, while the aurochs are uncanny, out of their own time and space, they also exist as a mirror for humanity. She realizes that in the aurochs’ time, when they were “king of the world,” she “wouldn’t even be Hushpuppy. I would just be breakfast” (Beasts 9:42-9:58). In her time, when humanity now rules as “king of the world,” the aurochs is a relic, and in this Hushpuppy sees herself in the beasts as they work both as kin and as an omen for the possibility of human extinction. In this moment, Hushpuppy understands how being a strange stranger in the Anthropocene means overcoming human scale and recognizing oneself as both hunter and hunted, meat and heartbeat.

Beasts of the Southern Wild animates Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye’s summary of Emmanuel Lévinas’ assertion that “we become ourselves by turning toward the other” (152). In the world of the Bathtub, in the world of the oil refineries, and in the world of Anthropocene, we may transform the hegemonic other into the ecological strange stranger, echoing Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” (162). This does not mean that hierarchies dissolve—the film also makes crucial points about the unfairness of the Anthropocene that we must work to overcome. However, the film asserts that, using Morton’s term, we all exist as strange strangers, uncanny, subversive, intimate, and distant at once, a notion that may help us understand even more Anthropocene narratives. Beasts of the Southern Wild shows how this epoch highlights our connections and inequalities that, if we take after Hushpuppy, we may recognize “when it all goes quiet,” and in the end we may see that we, too, are “a little piece of a big, big universe” full of strange strangers alike (1:27:02-1:27:11).

Works Cited

Antadze, Nino. “Who is the Other in the age of the Anthropocene? Introducing the Unknown Other in climate justice discourse.” The Anthropocene Review, vol. 6, no. 1-2, pp. 38-54.

Beasts of the Southern Wild. Directed by Benh Zeitlin, performances by Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2012.

Crist, Eileen. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 129-147.

Emmett, Robert S., and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction, the MIT Press, 2017.

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought, Harvard UP, 2010.

Rocheleau, Dianne, and Padini Nirmal. “Culture.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, et al., New York UP, 2016, pp. 50-55.

Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “Anthropocene.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, et al., New York UP, 2016, pp. 14-16.

Note: I wrote the original version of this essay in January of this year for the graduate course English 504: Posthumanism with Dr. Jason Bryant at ASU on the topic of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing asserts the telling of stories as a “method,” even “a science” with “[i]ts research object…contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis…the indeterminate encounter” (37). In similar fashion, I now turn briefly to Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington.

Like the “satoyama” forests of Japan and the remains of the logging industry in “Oregon’s eastern Cascades,” Gas Works Park stands as “a legacy of progress” (Tsing 151, 193; Mackay 12). Built on the site of an early 20^th-century “coal gasification plant,” Gas Works Park provides a way to think on Tsing’s concepts of capitalism, history, contamination, patches, multispecies assemblages, and latent commons (“Gas Works Park”). Left to decay, the city of Seattle bought the old gas plant and in 1976 “opened [it] to the public” as a park (Mackay 40). Instead of covering up the land’s past use, however, landscape architect Richard Haag incorporated many of the plant’s buildings into the park design (“Gas Works Park”). Rusted red-brown metal tanks, stairs, and pipes stand on lush green lawns, a dissonance that many of us are not used to. But why are we not used to such sites? As Hailey Mackay writes in her master’s thesis Enhancing Legacy / Engaging Process: Phytoremediation at Gas Works Park, “[a]s early-industrialized nations continue to export manufacturing industries, post-industrial landscapes are increasingly common,” however “[d]eep levels of contamination” from industrial processes make such landscapes difficult and costly to remediate (1). Because of this, Gas Works Park remains an exception, with most other post-industrial sites set aside to make room for “progress.” But such sites are themselves reminders of the hegemony of capitalist progress. Gas Works Park then reveals something strange about capitalism: it doesn’t like to look back on its own history. Tsing writes of “industrial tree plantation[s]” as examples of capitalism’s desire to erase history through uniformity and productivity, calling attention to “alienation” (167-176, 123). But Gas Works Park shows that capitalism also alienates itself from the history of progress. Landscapes are used and then left for the next site. Capitalist logics cannot accommodate remediation into its system of forward motion. Remediating land takes time, multispecies relationships, and money.

Gas Works Park seems to stand in the face of this logic. In the process of making the gas works site into a park, “Haag used a variety of organic matter and bacterial microbes to begin remediating [polluted] soils” (Mackay 12). Mackay’s own thesis explores the use of “phytoremediation,” or “the use of specialized plants to absorb or otherwise mitigate pollutants,” as way to clean up soil in Gas Works Park (1). With such remediation comes multispecies “assemblages,” where bacteria, plants, fungi, and urban animals exist within one space (Tsing 22-23). This recalls Tsing’s “patchiness,” and is one example of “disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest” (4-5; italics removed). Looking at the old industrial metal among the “nature” of the park is uncanny, as it flies in the face of what we’ve come to expect from capitalistic progress. Haag’s design shows how we may live with our past and with other beings, defying capitalism’s urge to look away and look forward.

Even more, contamination still remains, a state that echoes Tsing’s assertion that “[e]veryone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (27). Gas Works Park takes this premise literally, as “contamination created by the now statuesque towers still lies buried beneath [visitors’] feet” (Mackay 2). Phytoremediation keeps “leaching” at bay, with “plant roots” locking toxins below the surface (Mackay 1). But, as the metal towers remind us, history remains. That history includes a “traditional fishing area used by Native Americans,” its traces left in a salmon migration route that runs past the edge of the park in Lake Union (Mackay 35, 39). Gas Works Park invites reflection on human-nonhuman relationships, contamination, capitalism, and history. We find beauty in this ruin, a ruin that stimulates a posthuman sense of unease: time moves laterally between past and present, and space moves vertically up to the towers and down to the contaminated soils below. While the park itself also came about because of capitalism, following outsourcing and the desire of people in cities to encounter “nature” among new tech industry—Mackay also emphasizes the biophilic “value” of the park—I’d rather move such cynicism aside to appreciate what thought processes the strangeness of the park may create (1). Hopefully it reminds us of precarity and the heterogeneity of being.

I’ll end this brief story of Gas Works Park with an assessment of the site as a “latent commons,” based on Tsing’s criteria on page 255 of her book:

1. “Latent commons are not exclusive human enclaves.” Gas Works Park has multispecies assemblages built into its design. Humans and plants play on the surface. Bacteria and fungi play beneath, digesting contaminants and fixing nitrogen for plants in an array of mutualisms. Humans may have led the site to this configuration, but humans alone did not make the park exist.
2. “Latent commons are not good for everyone.” Who benefits from this park? Who lives close enough to enjoy the park in an affluent city like Seattle? What forests and shores were lost in the process of getting to this present?
3. “Latent comments [sic] don’t institutionalize well.” Gas Works Park is a successful public project, but it won’t work anywhere. Capitalist logic precludes remediation of most post-industrialist spaces, as noted above.
4. “Latent commons cannot redeem us.” Gas Works Park cannot make up for the damage that capitalism still creates. While one affluent city in an affluent country can make beauty from ruins, other parts of the world must still suffer in ruins. We must live “amidst the trouble” (Tsing 255).

This trouble surrounds us now, as we all know acutely. Working with the trouble and understanding precarity as a process of creation and reorientation gives us somewhere to go, even if we don’t know where that is.

Works Cited

“Gas Works Park.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 2020, www.tclf.org/landscapes/gas-works-park Links to an external site.. Accessed 26 Jan. 2022.

Mackay, Hailey. Enhancing Legacy / Engaging Process: Phytoremediation at Gas Works Park. 2016. University of Washington, master’s thesis.

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton UP, 2015.

Note: I wrote the original version of this essay in 2020 for the undergraduate course English 352: Short Story with Dr. Steve Farmer at ASU.

If Virginia Woolf’s work is to be judged by any of her critical words, then let them be that “any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express,” and that “there is no limit to the horizon” (“Modern Fiction” 8, 9). Through the tempting relativism of her words lies the promise of direction and follow-through. If the shapelessness that she professes is as pioneering as she claims, then let her show us the salvation of the modern, let her show us how to capture the life that “escapes” so often in misguided moralizing attempts at literary indelibility (“Modern Fiction” 7). Like the “spiritual…flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain,” Woolf, as a literary ecclesiastic guiding us through a dappled sanctuary of light and color, does indeed reveal the “other aspects of life” in her short story “Kew Gardens” (“Modern Fiction” 8). She transforms the garden into a modernist church where the mutability of words is sacrosanct, beginning with a bursting cacophony of color and confusion, as “perhaps a hundred stalks” come alive with “heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves,” and a “red, blue, or yellow gloom of the throat,” from which emerges “a straight bar, rough with the gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end” (“Kew” 1689). As if to prove her experimentalism, she dashes the Romantic notions of incorruptible nature by placing in our minds a creature with the grotesque incoherence of tentacles rising up from the ground until ah!—they are but flowers “stirred by the summer breeze” (“Kew” 1689).

The strength of Woolf’s writing within “Kew Gardens” is that she examines the parts of life that are often missed by traditional literature. That is to say, she explores the nexus of imagination and perception, the magic of life that we so often perceive faint feelings of, like the softest feather tickling the depths of our mind, but that we rarely are able to express on grand scales that make sense to us intellectually rather than viscerally. These are the “atoms [that] fall upon the mind,” the stained glass of the “red, blue, and yellow lights” of flowers “staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour” (“Modern Fiction” 8, “Kew” 1689). Woolf takes thoughts without words—those pre-literate neuronal firings that reside deep within our psyche—and coaxes them out into the literary light. To see the world clearly and fancifully is a gift; to articulate how “instead of rambling vaguely the white butterflies dance one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered, marble column above the tallest flowers” is divine (“Kew” 1693). Woolf enlarges the minute amongst the garish gigantism of the things we deem important in quotidian life—is it not these fleeting moments that bring so much holiness to the transiency of our experiences? These are the “myriad impressions” of the mind, the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that “shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday” (“Modern Fiction” 7). Like “Mr. Joyce” and the Russian writers she mentions with envy, Woolf creates within her microcosmic world of “Kew Gardens” an impressionistic painting of perception in its rawest form.

Woolf does not, however, wallow in her pools of light and color, risking pure sentiment, but rather reminds us too of the clashing world that makes such moments so remarkable. Men and women weave in and out of the story “with a curiously irregular movement” that is like that of “the white and blue butterflies” (“Kew” 1690). “The man”: he enters our vision with demanded familiarity, and suddenly the general is startled into the specific, our eyes forcefully jerked to focus upon a man and woman (“Kew” 1690). They are the man and woman, creatures whose speech is so reminiscent of quietly private thoughts that it seems a vulgarity that they interrupt the garden church with such tastelessness (“Kew” 1690). We sigh with relief as they walk away, “diminish[ing] in size among the trees” and looking “half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches,” thanking or cursing them for diverting our gaze (“Kew” 1690). The spirit of nature comes alive again, then, with the return of the flower bed and the focus drawn upon a “snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so” (“Kew” 1691). Oh, but for those two minutes how we were diverted, how much we can miss when our gaze goes astray! And how quickly our gaze is diverted once again from the snail’s struggle of whether to “circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it” when the irreverent coarseness of human beings shocks us from our molluscan meditation (“Kew” 1691).

Woolf’s focus upon the world of the snail amongst the giant, interrupting humans is a perspective choice that marks her work as modern. In “Kew Gardens,” the snail is “the emphasis…upon something hitherto ignored” (“Modern Fiction” 8). In a postmodern—or post-postmodern—world, such specificities in literature seem given, perhaps even trite, but it is writers like Woolf who gave such formlessness form and meaning. Woolf deliberately “break[s] and bull[ies]” the personified “art of fiction,” pushing the boundaries of literary possibility and permissibility (“Modern Fiction” 9). Her story is without definite structure, as fuzzy as the flowers shedding colored light upon the ground. She turns this garden scene into a sacred place, a cathedral of light, color, and meaning down to the quantum level where time and literary conventions dissolve. More people come and go, the snail returns, and his struggle is delayed again. We observe these peoples’ words and comparatively inelegant actions, and then, as if we have caught enough of an anthropological glimpse to plumb the depths of such a strange, interruptive species, the couples blur together “with much the same irregular and aimless movement” (“Kew” 1693). The church of nature arises again in all its detailed glory, as the people with their “gross and heavy bodies…dissolve…like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere” (“Kew” 1693). But then suddenly their “wordless voices” return to gather into this cathedral’s chorus, as it rises through the sultry air and the…not silence. Not silence at all, “there was no silence” (“Kew” 1693). The sounds of the city march on in the distance, and the moment of stillness is broken as the world floods back with roaring intensity, and the temporary illusion of sublimity collapses into chaos and crowds.

The weight and wideness of this new world is confusing and speaks to the “vague and inconclusive” short stories that Woolf dares to allow (“Modern Fiction” 9). As she writes about the “inconclusiveness of the Russian mind”:

“[It] has the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair.”

Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” p. 9

Woolf, however, speaks of Russian writers with admiration and the fear that “one runs the risk of feeling that to write any fiction save theirs is a waste of time” (“Modern Fiction” 9). But Woolf’s fears are misplaced, as she indeed reaches this trembling poignancy in the fact that, unlike in much traditional literature, we do not know the characters’ fates. We all wish to be gods with a voyeuristic omniscience that fulfills our base desires to know and judge, but Woolf reins us in and lets us sit with our greedy eyes in the confounding tristesse that we will never know more than the little she gives us. Woolf prevents us from venturing too far into the sharp world of judgment; we don’t know enough of these passing characters to feel confident in our prophecies. But, though disconcerting, isn’t this choice an act of poignant sympathy, in line with the Russian writers she reveres? Somehow it is just enough to know that these people exist, and that Woolf immortalizes the quickness of life, leaving us with a residue of memory and perception and the realization that yes, profundity can indeed be found in boundless experimentation.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. “Kew Gardens.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8th edition, edited by Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 1689-1694.

—. “Modern Fiction.” 1921.