Chapter 8. Mahuto-futurism
Human-elephant cohabitation in the ecumenopolis
p. 157-170
Texte intégral
Introduction
1Many conservationist studies concerned with the future of Asian elephants look to a short-term temporal horizon, analysing land use or funding possibilities for the next decade or two. While this temporal framing has value, it misses a looming problem for the elephants, as well as for a great many other species: the plausibility that the planet-wide human population will increase so dramatically over the next century and beyond that entire habitats will become erased.
2With this plausibility in mind, this paper adopts a more futurist orientation and begins from a premise that radical shifts in human techno-social organisation will take place which urbanise tropical and temperate forests. From this vantage point, the concept, or spectre, of the “ecumenopolis,” developed by 1960s-70s urban planning theorist Constantinos Doxiadis, merits attention within environmentalist discourse. The ecumenopolis is an eventual planet-wide human city. Conservationist thinkers need to imagine problems and possibilities in a potential ecumenopolitan planetary future. This is especially pronounced for conservationists who are concerned with species whose corporeal spatial needs exceed those of humans: conservationists concerned, that is, with megafauna like Asian elephants. Will there be room for elephants in an ecumenopolis?
3This essay is divided into three parts. The first part addresses a premise (one that is increasingly widespread) that planetary human population growth is on the cusp of a permanent plateau—a premise which I critique here, instead stressing the need to think in terms of persistent human population growth and an ecumenopolitan planetary fate. The second part of the paper pivots to considering Asian elephants and their capacity for integration into environments thickly settled with human beings. This section is especially concerned with empirically observable situations, in the present day or in recent decades, where human communities have been able to simultaneously absorb elephants into the human work environment (as opposed to recreational environments), while also generating positive biometrical outcomes for elephants in terms of reproduction and life expectancy. This dynamic, associated in particular with the forest mahouts of Myanmar (Burma) and Northeast India, significantly widens the scope of future possibilities for human-elephant co-species cohabitation. The third part of the paper shifts gears again, looking beyond this empirically-grounded discussion of the mahout-elephant duo’s socio-geographical capabilities to various artworks which begin to visually and narratively articulate a “mahuto-futurism” to elephant conservationists and planetary futurists alike.
Demographic plateau or ecumenopolis?
4Conservationists’ assumptions regarding future human population growth in upcoming centuries are powerful, though perhaps under-studied, factors shaping their strategic decisions regarding what sorts of projects and ideas to invest in and what sorts to put aside or ignore. The present world population (as of 2021) is 7.9 billion. Numerous high-profile population projection agencies and demographic research bodies anticipate a plateauing of population growth by around the turn of the next century—a plateauing due, according to these agencies, to various modern conditions associated with diminished fertility rates (conditions such as widespread education for women, family planning biotechnologies, etc.). A few examples will suffice. The United Nations anticipates a population plateau of 11 billion in the early 22nd century (UNDP, 2019). The Wittgenstein Center for Demography anticipates a plateau of 9.4 billion as early as 2070 (Our World in Data, 2016).
5Note that these anticipated peaks are not so far beyond the present world population. Thus, if these projections are right, then a conservationist who has developed strategies intended for a world with 7.9 billion people—that is, for today’s world—can reasonably expect that the same strategies will work in a world with nine or ten or eleven billion people. If, instead, the conservationist is expecting a world population in a few centuries which will be, say, five times the present population, then the conservationist will be likelier to recognise the need for a radical new environmental paradigm for that upcoming hyper-populated world and to stagger present-day environmentalist resources (intellectual, institutional, geopolitical) accordingly. Clearly, conservationists’ intellectual relationship with these demographic projections matters a good deal.
6The main reason to be at least somewhat sceptical of the “near-term plateau” projection is thousands of years of history. We are in a population growth slowdown phase. But overall human population growth has gone through periods of growth-slowdown and short-lived plateauing before, such as during the early medieval period (when the “plateau” was around 220 million) (McEvedy & Jones, 1978). The slowdown period was, of course, followed by explosive population growth. In other words, the “plateau” proved illusory.
7A useful theoretical counterpoint to the presumption of a near-term demographic plateau is to be found in the concept of the ecumenopolis, coined by 1960s-70s urban planning theorist Constantinos Doxiadis. The ecumenopolis is a hypothesised future planet-wide city. Thinking from the vantage point of the 1960s and 70s, Doxiadis imagines major metropoles soon agglomerating to form regional supercities; regional supercities agglomerating to form continent-cities; and eventually, these continent-cities agglomerating to become a single, worldwide city: a continuous field of high-density human population. The most comprehensive elaboration of the concept is in the 1974 book Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future, which Doxiadis co-authored with the architect and (intriguingly) musicologist John G. Papaioannou (Doxiadis & Papaioannou, 1974). The authors see as the proper role for future urban planners the spatial and administrative disciplining of this urbanising world-force into selected mega-density corridors. For the leftover spaces between these corridors, Doxiadis calls, in a related work, for the cultivation of hybrid urban-garden zones, what he calls entopias (Doxiadis, 1975). Doxiadis and his intellectual cohort derive the need for this paradigm shift in global urban planning from the assumption that the multi-millennial pattern of human population growth, extending back to the agricultural revolution, will continue into and demographically define the third millennium AD (Doxiadis & Papaioannou, 1974). The emphasis for them, however, is not on demographic projection per se but rather on the issue of spatial planning. This, I would submit, is how conservationists today should be thinking about future planetary possibilities as well. The key question is not whether the future global population will be one number or another (this is impossible to credibly predict), but rather: how can first-order environmentalist concerns like species-conservation even function if the future planetary surface (perhaps even including the oceans, though Doxiadis does not explore this possibility) becomes ecumenopolitan? Perhaps the world will never actually become much more ecumenopolitan than it is now; but conservationists should begin to build a collection of possible solutions for the ecumenopolitan dilemma, at least to keep in their back pocket. And, for elephantologists, this conceptual imperative should loom especially large—I would even argue it should be a core theoretical device configuring this entire field of inquiry. The question of species conservation in the planet-wide city is, after all, especially pronounced for megafauna whose corporeal spatial needs exceed those of humans. Such megafauna cannot plausibly cohabitate with humans in urbanised landscapes, given the current spatial paradigm determining how urbanisation unfolds.
Asian elephants in human work environments
8In the early 21st century, roughly a third of Asian elephants are to be found not in the wild, far from humans, but rather in cities, towns, and villages. Many of these elephants experience poor biometric outcomes in terms of reproduction and life expectancy. Some, however, experience positive biometric outcomes (Shell, 2019). Conservationists should take note of this latter group and gauge their situation’s potential for emulation and scalability. The fact that, instead, international conservationist discourse has mostly overlooked this subset of Asian elephants—that is, those who dwell in environments dense with humans and also experience positive biometrical outcomes—is, I would contend, a reflection of conservationists’ overly-narrow futurological assumptions. Conservationists are imagining a future planet with a human population size not unlike the present one: a planet where existing forest ranges, free of substantial human settlement, can plausibly receive legal protections as the proper grounds for wildlife conservation and re-expansion of endangered forest species like Asian elephants. Most conservationists are not imagining a future ecumenopolis-like planetary situation where there isn’t enough space for vast urbanisation- and agriculturalisation-free zones.
9The existence, in the present era, of elephants who spatially cohabitate with humans and also reproduce at a promising rate (one birth every 11 or 12 years during the female’s three-decade period of fertility) and live relatively long lives (six or seven decades) thus starts to look far more significant when an ecumenopolitan image of the future receives proper conceptual consideration and emphasis. These elephants, which number eight or nine thousand overall, are the “forest work elephants” of the forest ranges of Myanmar and Northeast India (Shell, 2019; Lainé, 2020). They facilitate human-imposed, forest-centric tasks such as moving felled timber, transporting goods and people across roadless forest terrain, and transporting goods and people during monsoon season, when roads become flooded or otherwise obstructed by weather debris (Shell, 2019). These forest-work elephants experience relatively good biometrical outcomes because, unlike tamed elephants in most tourist parks, zoos, circuses, etc., they are given the freedom to wander the forest on a nightly basis. Here in the nocturnal forest, Asian elephants are far more comfortable mating than when they find themselves in enclosed facilities (Clubb et al., 2008; Taylor & Poole, 1998; Kurt & Mar, 1996). Despite receiving this periodic time away from humans, forest work elephants are still very much absorbed into human work communities. These communities are not “cities” as we would conventionally understand cities, but rather are densely settled social geographies affiliated with the work elephants’ human riders, their mahouts.
10Just how spatially absorbed the elephants are into these human communities depends on which region of elephant-based forest work one is looking. As recently as the 2010s, two patterns of co-species spatial integration were empirically observable. In Kachin State, Myanmar, and eastern Arunachal Pradesh, India, mahout families tend to live in busy roadside towns with much else going on besides elephant-based work; elephants only occasionally show up to the outskirts of the town to fetch people or supplies to bring farther afield, to forest camps. The elephants and their mahouts spend far more time at these camps, and mahouts’ non-mahout family members only rarely venture this far away from town life. By contrast, in southern and central Myanmar, at least up through the mid-2010s, this spectrum is more collapsed into a single co-species space: here, government-administered “mahout villages” have mahouts, mahouts’ family members, and elephants all in the same village space, with elephants exiting the village core for forest timber to haul, or for their nightly period of rest and potential mating in the forest (Shell, 2019). These mahout villages, organised by the Burmese forestry department and Myanmar Timber Enterprise, come closest to conveying how human families and elephant families can productively (and re-productively) cohabitate within a relatively dense social space.
11The continued existence and health of the surrounding forestland itself is, of course, necessary for the sustainability of this arrangement, and in a sense this necessity limits the potential of these sylvan work elephant zones for extreme human density. Recall, though, that Doxiadis’s ecumenopolis scheme calls not only for well-planned hyperdense human corridors but also leftover entopian zones with mixed city-like and garden-like spatial features. Could a future mahout-village with surrounding sylvan hinterland be like an entopia and thus find a place for itself in a wider planetary ecumenopolis?
12The necessity of the forest also limits the long-term scalability of timber-felling as a form of value for working elephants to provide to their affiliated human community. Indeed, recent government constraints imposed on elephant-based logging in southern and central Myanmar signal this limit. Yet, the more transportation-oriented functions which present-day forest work elephants perform do not compromise the forest cover. These transport functions are all too often overlooked compared with the more commodity-centric (and perhaps more visually striking) timber-hauling functions; they shouldn’t be. Furthermore, while the forest work elephant’s ability to transport people and cargo across roadless areas may eventually become obsolete as road networks expand (a likely eventuality in an ecumenopolitan future), the forest work elephant’s ability to facilitate transport when floods have rendered the roads unusable for regular automotive traffic seems much likelier to persist as a uniquely valuable, non-obsolete elephant-reliant function.
13This point about transport during floods is worth lingering upon, for the future ecumenopolis may very well prove to be a place where floods still happen; and the well-planned ecumenopolis may need to be a place where many water features are intentionally permitted to ebb and flow with the coming and going of seasonal and other Earth-system cycles. High-profile science-fictional visual portrayals of “planet cities”, such as Coruscant in George Lucas’s Star Wars universe, usually show a planet whose entire surface has been infrastructurally rigidified into so many inflexible superhighways and supercanals of titanic planetary scale—as if the whole planet had become a single concrete orb-shaped edifice. The more plausible ecumenopolitan outcome—and one more in keeping with the spirit of Doxiadis’s original concept—is a planet where omnipresent urbanisation and agriculturalisation are spatially integrated with the physical likelihood of persistent geomorphological dynamism: spatially integrated, that is, with rivers that migrate as silt builds up and erodes; with shorelines that change location as sea levels fluctuate and tectonic plates churn; with topography that becomes reconfigured due to seismic activity, vulcanism, and landslides. If the ecumenopolis has cycles of flooding, and if it has transient, dynamic boundaries between land and water features, it may, in fact, require a transport-creature (though perhaps a robotic one) very much like an Asian baggage elephant: quadrupedal, attuned to humans’ needs in a given situation; terraqueous in mobility; capable of fording or swimming transient water courses; capable of going where the fixed infrastructure cannot go. In my research, I have indeed observed elephants used for flood-time transport in Assam and Myanmar (Shell, 2015; Shell, 2019).
14Thus, a future ecumenopolis may not have sufficient practical incentives to establish vast, human-free forest preserves intended for big herds of wild megafauna—indeed, the point of the preceding thought experiment has been precisely to bracket and set aside that entire thread of possibility. But, the ecumenopolis may very well have sufficient numbers of humans in tropical flood-prone areas that the planet-city does, in fact, have sufficient incentive to seed into certain planned “entopia” zones, various mahout villages and sylvan hinterlands. With these elephant-sustaining zones in place, ecumenopolitan administrators could send teams of logistical relief elephants into flooded areas to ferry people and cargo across transient shallows which other vehicles cannot traverse.
Mahuto-futurist images
15I close the essay with an exploration of three visions which I would characterise as “mahuto-futurist”: as imagining a future in which the mahout-elephant duo has retained, or reasserted, its practical importance and value. I draw attention to these images in the spirit of cutting against the grain of technological assumption; or, put another way, in the spirit of visually expanding elephantologists’ feel for “the futurological” as a conceptual device which organizes strategic thinking in the here and now.
16The first, “Springlife Factory”, by the illustrator Julien Gauthier (Figure 1), is concept-art inspired by the 2009 bio-punk novel The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi, 2009). Bacigalupi’s novel is set in 23rd century Bangkok, in a future world, partially dystopian, where progress in conventional energy technologies has stalled, but progress in biotechnologies like cloning and genetically modified organisms has raced ahead. Thus, in cities like Bangkok, certain kinds of “joule”-intensive activities such as ground transport, lifting, and dragging rely on cloned giant pachyderms called “megadonts.” These creatures are not described at length in Bacigalupi’s book, comprising just one part of the rich background scenery of the world Bacigalupi has woven into narrative being. Yet the few details the author offers about the urban-megadont dynamic are suggestive. For example, Bacigalupi imagines the megadonts’ mahouts, or drivers, as unionized, and their union is one of the most powerful political factions in the city. This aspect contributes to the political intrigue which is at the core of the story in The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi, 2009).
17In Gauthier’s visual scene, presented as part of a series the artist calls Bangkok XXIII, Gauthier has put Bacigalupi’s megadonts to work in a factory making coil springs. This is another detail from the book: the potential energy of coil springs has become especially important in this energy-scarce future world order. In another illustration in Bangkok XXIII, Gauthier shows the megadonts’ dragging containers to hovering zeppelins, further associating the cloned elephantids with such “backup” techno-mechanical principles which have taken on new importance in a world without fossil fuels (Figure 2).
18In both Bacigalupi’s storytelling and the Gauthier imagery, the lives of the megadonts register as drearily negative and work to convey The Windup Girl’s dystopian undercurrent. This is, perhaps, an image of elephantid survival, but survival into a slave-like and mechanical condition—a condition which one supposes elephants today, were it possible to ask them, would never choose even if the only other option were extinction. Nonetheless, it does present a narratological and visual template for imagining a kind of megafaunal survival, however bleak, into a potential hyper-urbanized future.
19A more positive image is to be found in the futurist artwork of a Soviet painter, Gennady Golobokov (https://jacobshell.carbonmade.com/projects/7203478). This work from 1976 is entitled “Genetics Research Institute.” It shows two biological engineers in the interior of a lab space; outside, two additional human scientists are interacting with a pair of woolly mammoths. One of the mammoths is an adult, and the other a juvenile. The painting is unusual within Golobokov’s oeuvre of futuristic imagery, which mostly focuses on outer space, showing cosmonauts triumphantly exploring and settling far-flung corners of the galaxy. This painting instead spatially redirects that thrust of fantastical and heroic techno-progressive energy downward towards a more familiar (but in its own way also mind-bendingly immense) space, the Siberian taiga. Unlike the Gauthier imagery, the Golobokov painting makes ambiguous whether any of the humans present are really “mahouts”—whether, that is, they intend to train and do co-species work with these revived elephantids. The outdoor cross-species encounter does seem to indicate that the mammoths are quite tame or at least friendly towards the humans. But the artist is not interested in explicitly conveying the practical meaning of this friendliness. Though this thread of possibility was likely not directly imagined by Golobokov, from the vantage point of the 21st century, we can imagine that these mammoths have been brought back to “do a job” for the benefit of the planet’s denizens within and beyond the taiga. Some scientists today argue that a reintroduction of neo-mammoths (cloned from spliced mammoth and Asian elephant DNA) into Siberia and subarctic North America would stabilize the carbon-sequestration capacity of the taiga and tundra (Mann, 2018). In this scenario, the “job” of the revived elephantids would be the steadying of the ecumenopolis’s planetary “HVAC system”. Likely, neo-mammoths with this level of responsibility would require human handlers of some sort.
20Another image in this subgenre of visual work imagines a futuristic role for elephant-like creatures evocative of known practical mobilities observable in some of the elephant-mahout settlements in Myanmar and Northeast India in the 21st century: evocative, that is, of trained Asian elephants’ unique abilities as creatures of transport in forested and monsoon-soaked landscapes. This is a work by the science-fiction illustrator Frank Paul, which adorns the back cover of the April 1961 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories (https://jacobshell.carbonmade.com/projects/7203478). Only one line of text, on the previous page of the issue, describes the image: “Phantasmagoria of a Venusion scene”. The odd suffix, “-ion,” may be a simple mistyping of “-ian,” or it may be a subtle signal to the reader that the scene is not necessarily “Venusian” in the sense of being located on the planet Venus. (The landscape is watery and intensely fecund, both qualities associated with the Roman goddess.)
21Active during the middle of the 20th century, the artist has picked up on trained Asian elephants’ practical association with terraqueous transportation and with movement between dense human settlements and sylvan hinterlands surrounding these settlements. The artist has then accentuated this association along fantastical lines: the mahout village is a mahout city; Paul’s elephantids have fins for navigating in the water; the giants are large enough to take a busload rather than a mere handful of human passengers. Viewers may be struck by how the elephantids keep their trunks upturned for oxygen while they swim. This feature is, in fact, something which present-era “ferry elephants” do—such as those that took passengers back and forth across the Sissiri River in Arunachal Pradesh, India, as recently as 2017 (Shell, 2019). But Paul’s creatures’ trunks seem to be upright by default, rather than slack. The elephantids of the “Venusion scene” have been bioengineered, perhaps, for the transport needs of the monsoon-city of the future. However, they seem to radiate a degree of agency and triumph that Gauthier’s haplessly enslaved factory megadonts do not. Paul’s elephantids have access to what appears to be an open hinterland of tropical trees and orchids. Perhaps they, like many of today’s timber and transport elephants in Myanmar and Northeast India, enjoy a long daily period of rest and relaxation there.
22How Paul arrived at these visual associations, especially between elephantids and terraqueous transport, is unclear. The artist does not seem to have spent time in South or Southeast Asia. It is plausible that, during the 1950s, he read some of the well-circulated accounts of the China-Burma-India theatre of World War II in which transport elephants feature prominently (see Williams, 1950).
Conclusion
23The value of these images for elephantologists is not that they should provide “models” for what a human-elephantid future ought to look like. Elephants should not necessarily be bioengineered into subarctic carbon-negators or finned lacustrine ferry-creatures, and one should hope they won’t be bioengineered into factory grunts. Rather, the images’ value is that they help carve out a badly-needed imaginative frontier where a distant human future still entails spatial cohabitation with elephantid megafauna. These images are a signal to think as much about 2300 as 2030.
24Clearly, the present demographic situation of Asian elephants is dire enough that we need some conservationists who are focused on the near- rather than long-term horizon. But we need the latter, more futurological, current of thinking, too, not least because certain aspects of the existing human-elephant dynamic take on new conceptual importance when they’re considered with long-term planetary possibilities in mind. I have presented the mahout-elephant duo’s unique mobility during flood season as an example. Some readers may dismiss as implausible, as merely a daydream, the notion of a future world which is hyper-dense with humans but also has—in the “entopias” between the densest urban corridors—a half million or so elephants who specialize in terraqueous and trans-sylvan transport. I contend that such a world is at least as plausible as one where a vast wilderness reserve, vast enough for half a million wild elephants, somehow finds room for itself between India and China. This “vast wilderness reserve” scenario seems especially implausible if the human population over the course of the next several centuries fails to settle into a permanent plateau of only 9-12 billion people.
25Elephant conservationists should open themselves to a current of thinking and imagining which I have here called “mahuto-futurist.” If humans and elephants are going to cohabitate on a densifying, ecumenopolitanising planet, the mahout cannot become an obsolete figure because the mahout, and the forest-oriented mahout, in particular, is the essential link between a biometrically healthy elephant and a densely humanized planetary space. To many, the mahout-elephant pair may register as an anachronism out of a more animal-centred chapter of the human experience, a chapter which much of the rest of the world moved on from long ago. The articulation of alternatives to this assumption, whether through reference to futurist imagery or research on the unique, in some ways irreplaceable capabilities and mobilities of the mahout-elephant partnership in the here and now, is a vital task for those who want to expand the range of known options for how to share a shrinking planet with other forms of sentient life.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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