Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain’s wartime ...domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory’s history are partial and selective.
In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-human geography's distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on 'certain subjects' ...but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that 'we' are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provides an everyday ethic that can accommodate more-than-human difference. I do this by analysing how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and 'show me your garden' walking tours with experienced gardeners. The article is aligned with a widening bestiary of companion species in geography, and considers the appearances and disappearances of a domestic monster: the slug. Therefore in contrast to existing literature the paper explores gardening's darker aspects. First, I describe how slugs and gardeners are 'sticky': joined together by shared histories, curiosity and disgust. The paper then shifts to examine how gardeners practice detachment: distancing themselves from the act of killing slugs but yet avowing the violence of their actions; acknowledging the limits of their capacities to bend space to their will and imagination; recognising the vulnerability of slugs, and being transformed by that recognition. The analysis shows first, that the emphasis on gathering together and relationality obscures what lies outside relations, and second how detachment emerges not as the negation, but as an enabling constituent of more-than-human ethics. In conclusion the paper argues for looser mappings of relationality and ethics that attend more fully to the distance between species.
The Work That Plants Do Ernwein, Marion; Ginn, Franklin; Palmer, James
2022, 20211020, Volume:
45
eBook
Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection ...explores the `work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics.
Geoengineering, especially its potentially fast and high‐leverage versions, is often justified as a necessary response to possible future climate emergencies. In this article, we take the notion of ...‘necessity’ in international law as a starting point in assessing how rapid, high‐leverage geoengineering might be justified legally. The need to specify reliably ‘grave and imminent peril’ makes such a justification difficult because our scientific ability to predict abrupt climate change, for example, as tipping elements, is limited. The time it takes to establish scientific consensus as well as policy acceptance restricts the scope for effective forewarning and so pre‐emptive justifications for geoengineering become more tempting. While recognizing that dangerous, large‐scale impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, the pre‐emptive, emergency frame is problematic. We suggest that arguments from emergency operate on a high level of uncertainty and tend toward hubristic attempts to shape the future, as well as tending to close down rather than open up space for deliberation. We conclude that the emergency frame is not likely to go away, that ignoring or repressing it is a dangerous response, and that more effort is required to defuse and disarm emergency rhetoric. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:281–290. doi: 10.1002/wcc.263
This article is categorized under:
Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making
What does it mean that plants-soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more-are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might ...they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space science. Second, the allying of crops and elites in late neolithic plantation agriculture. Third, the cosmic and global travels of the kumara, figuring Māori plant alliances that take us beyond colonial ideologies of space exploration. Fourth, a science fiction art installation growing plants in a prototyped Martian House. Drawing on vegetal geographies, critical plants studies and Anthropocene geophilosophy, the paper is a work in speculative planetology which argues that plants are seeking to stretch out beyond Earth and enable other planets to become otherwise: photosynthesis is a vegetal gift to the cold cosmos.
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond ...appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel practice for critical plant studies, vegetal geographies and multispecies studies.
This qualitative study draws on in‐depth interviews and documentary analysis conducted between 2014 and 2016 to investigate the nature of pro‐environmental behaviour of members within the ...Eco‐Congregation Scotland network. We argue for an integrative analytical frame, that we call “eco‐theo‐citizenship,” which synthesises strengths of values‐, practice‐ and citizenship‐based approaches to the study of pro‐environmental behaviour within the specific context of religious environmental groups. This study finds the Eco‐Congregation groups studied are not primarily issue driven, and instead have an emphasis on “community‐building” activities and a concept of environmental citizenship which spans multiple political scales from local to international. Primary values emphasised included “environmental justice” and “stewardship.” Analysis of the data indicated that groups in this network are distinctive in two particular ways: (1) group focus on mobilising values and environmental concern towards “community building” can produce what looks like a more conservative approach to climate change mobilisation, preserving and working slowly within institutional structures, with a primary focus not on climate change mitigation per se but on the consolidation and development of the community and broader network; and (2) these groups can often under‐report their accomplishments and the footprint of their work on the basis of a common religious conviction which we have termed a “culture of modesty.”
This qualitative study draws on research conducted between 2014–2016 to investigate the nature of pro‐enviromental behaviour of members within the Eco‐Congregation Scotland network. We argue for an integrative analytical frame which we call “eco‐theo‐citizenship” which synthesises strengths of values‐, practice‐ and citizenship‐based approaches to the study of pro‐environmental behaviour within the specific context of religious environmental groups.
This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of ...memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus on: commemorabilia, including plants, which offer the possibility to materialize and anchor something of what would otherwise be lost; how absences are teased into awkward presence through conversation and reminiscence; and the importance of the ‘people’ who continue to produce the garden landscape after their death. Collectively, the practices I describe are an attempt to domesticate – that is, to coconstitute more malleable and familiar relations with – absent presences, and in so doing to seek a comfortable, even if ultimately impossible, alignment between self, past, memory and landscape. I stress that this seeking requires work: practical projects of digging, planting, weeding, of making memory and losing it again. In so doing, the article suggests that the spectral does not always arrive from the outside but is something that can be fabricated. I conclude that we should look to the practicalities of living rather than ideas of life, and to acts of landscaping rather than concepts of landscape, in seeking to ascertain the ways in which absence comes to matter.
In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been ...understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene-an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery-cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.
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