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Right Research

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Chelsea Miya
, 
Oliver Rossier
, 
Geoffrey Rockwell

Section one: Re-defining sustainability

3. Academia, Abstraction and the Anthropocene : Changing the Story for Right Relationship

Kristine Kowalchuk

Texte intégral

The following chapter by Kristine Kowalchuk argues the need for humanities scholars to recognize the ecological crisis as a cultural issue arising from modernity’s story of human separation from, and superiority over, nature. The author urges humanities scholars to help lead the way in telling a different story, to enable genuine positive change and healing. As Kowalchuk shows, this story is not a new story, but rather an ancient one, of right relationship between humans and nature, and it has persisted in the margins for over four hundred years.

  • 1 Quaker Earthcare Witness, Living in Right Relationship (n.d.), https://www.quakerearthcare.org/arti (...)

1In 2007, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s annual conference, held in Grande Prairie, was themed ‘Writing/Righting the Land’, and it focused on the ecological destruction caused by Alberta’s oilsands. At this time, there was still little open discussion of this problem, or even acknowledgement that there was a problem, and it felt like a relief to talk about it. But at one point, I expressed my frustration at the lack of direct action against the destruction. Rudy Wiebe, who was one of the keynote speakers, replied, ‘the role of the writer is not to directly act; it is to write about it’. I have mulled over this reply many times since then. On one hand, of course he had a point: the job of writers is indeed to write, and this is a powerful act. But on the other hand, I can’t help but think the statement reveals the depth of the problem—and that is modern culture’s abstract relationship with nature. ‘Writing’ is not automatically the same as ‘righting’. Rather, ‘righting’ surely means aiming for a ‘right relationship’ with nature, to use the Quaker John Woolman’s term,1 and any right relationship involves deep connection, active protection, respect, reciprocity, and care; anything less is dysfunction. We would not simply write about the abuse of a family member, so why would we do this when we witness abuse of the land?

  • 2 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000), (...)
  • 3 Colin N. Waters et al., ‘The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the H (...)
  • 4 Ralph Lidskog and Claire Waterton, ‘The Anthropocene: A narrative in the making’, in Environment an (...)
  • 5 Personal communication, March 23, 2017.

2Since that conference in 2007, it is clear that modern relationship with the land has not been righted, even though more has been written about it, including by a host of academics; in Alberta and globally, ecological destruction has only intensified. The planet has now entered the so-called Anthropocene geological epoch, in which the earth’s very processes have been altered by humans. The term was first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000,2 and affirmed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in the journal Science in early 2016.3 Over the past few years, there has been a flurry of discourse in many academic fields on the Anthropocene: the concept ‘has been institutionalized […] in a short period of time: networks have been formed, conferences organized, websites established, research programs […] elaborated and journals […] launched’ to discuss it, and the concept has now passed into the general cultural sphere as well, through art, film, and museum exhibitions.4 However, what the academic discourse has yet to fully grasp—and a misunderstanding now shared by the public—is the extent to which the problem is cultural. For it is obvious that a particular culture has led to the destruction, and this culture is not universal, and it did not exist throughout time. Canadian limnologist Dr. David Schindler has touched on this point, saying that the ecological crisis is no longer a scientific issue; it is now a communications issue.5 But really, it was always a communications issue, in that relationship with the land is culturally shaped, through language, history, and belief systems—and science comes second, as a component of one particular cultural frame and as a way of measuring the consequences of that frame. The abstract way in which modern culture relates to nature—evident even in the language we use to talk about it, in distant terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ and ‘Anthropocene’ itself—is both a result of anthropocentric thinking and the reason for the Anthropocene problem in the first place. This relationship, which is far from a ‘right’ one, reflects a destructive feedback loop in which individuals see themselves as separate from, and superior to, nature and resign themselves to the ruination of nature as inevitable, a necessary by-product of human ‘progress, ’ which ultimately leads to further separation and loss. However, once we recognize the Anthropocene as a cultural issue, we understand that natural destruction is not inevitable; we have alternatives. This enables us to imagine and articulate another relationship, a right one in which humans are reconciled with the land— and then we can actually shift toward it. Because it is a cultural issue, it is not just an opportunity but also a responsibility of the humanities to more critically and actively engage with it as such and to help to not just write, but to right this story.

  • 6 Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever’, The Guard (...)
  • 7 Eileen Crist, ‘On the poverty of our nomenclature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, Histor (...)
  • 8 Alex Blasdel, ‘ “A reckoning for our species”: The philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene’, The Gu (...)
  • 9 In Paul Schmelzer, ‘Omaa Akiing: Paul Schmelzer interviews Winona LaDuke’, in Land, Art: A Cultural (...)

3Such engagement should perhaps begin with discussion of the word Anthropocene. As both concept and term, Anthropocene carries, as Robert Macfarlane suggests, three main assumptions. First and foremost it is ‘arrogantly human-focused’, thereby further ‘embed [ding] the narcissist delusions that have produced the current crisis’,6 a point echoed by Eileen Crist, who criticizes the term as ‘a reflection and reinforcement’ of human-centeredness and ‘self-adulation’.7 Secondly, it is universalist, ‘ [glossing] over issues of race, class, gender, and colonialism’,8 suggesting all humans are equally responsible for the destruction, when of course this is not the case. Indigenous and traditional peoples have inhabited places around the world for thousands of years in a sustainable way. As Anishinaabe eco-advocate Winona LaDuke notes, ‘not everybody screws [nature] up. Some cultures coexist pretty well, work out a set of relations’.9 Likewise, Derrick Jensen bluntly states,

  • 10 Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016), p. 238.

[P] lenty of Indigenous cultures did not destroy their landbases. So I would argue that it is not that humans are stupid, but that this culture makes people stupid, in fact so stupid that they would rather kill the planet that is the source of our lives and the lives of all these other beautiful beings with whom we share this planet, than to acknowledge that they are making stupid social choice after stupid social choice.10

  • 11 Macfarlane (2016).

4Thirdly, it is ‘capitalist-technocratic’, ignoring ‘the role of ideology, empire and political economy’ in the past, and blind to our options for the future, merely encouraging technology as ‘a quick fix for climate change’; in this way, the Anthropocene is imagined as a ‘pragmatic problem to be managed […] within existing structures of governance’.11 These assumptions, therefore, specifically reflect a cultural frame of human self-centeredness, colonialism, capitalism, industrialism and the patriarchy, meaning a more accurate name for the era would in fact be the Egocoloniocapitoindustriopatriocene.

  • 12 Paul Kingsnorth, ‘The myth of progress’, Emergence, https://www.emergencemagazine.org/story/the-myt (...)

5But that still would not go deep enough. For underpinning all of these elements is a single belief that goes much further back: that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature. And this, of course, is the defining belief of the particular culture we call modernity. The problem is, many of us are so accustomed to this culture and its beliefs that we don’t even see it as a constructed story; instead, ‘ [w] e think it’s the truth. We think it’s real, rather than that it’s simply an interpretation of the world which we have chosen to believe’.12

  • 13 Pope Francis, however, suggests in his encyclical Laudato Sí: On Care for our Common Home that the (...)
  • 14 Martin Lee Mueller, Being Salmon Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild (White (...)
  • 15 In Schmelzer (2006), p. 65.
  • 16 My own research on seventeenth-century women’s recipes suggests that we might see modernity’s denun (...)
  • 17 Lessons from wolves show that this focus on competition is wrong. Wolf pack behavior reveals comple (...)

6Here, it is worth recounting the separation-and-superiority story of modernity. Although its seeds are in Christianity (in its belief in a God in human likeness who granted humans dominion over the earth),13 this story took root in seventeenth-century Europe, in the ideas that led to what we now call the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Most significant were René Descartes’s idea that the human is separate from nature and the mind is separate from the body, and Francis Bacon’s proposal that humans can view the world objectively (Bacon is considered one of the founders of the scientific method). These ideas profoundly changed western Europeans’ thinking, placing the ‘rational’ human mind at the centre of the universe (‘I think, therefore I am’) and excising ‘other ways of knowing—intuition, feeling, and sensing’.14 This thinking unraveled the implicit traditional understanding of life as a complex web of interconnected relationships, and introduced the idea of human exceptionalism or, as Derrick Jensen states in his book of the same name, ‘the myth of human supremacy’, which gave this culture license to exploit and consume nature (as well as Indigenous peoples—which Winona LaDuke notes is even wrapped up in the relationship between the words colonization and colon).15 This thinking also shifted understanding about time and place away from cycles and local specificity toward a linear conception of time and abstract, ‘universal’ principles separate from place, and turned authority away from folk culture, which involved collectivity and significant women’s authority,16 toward an individual, patriarchal, professional knowledge, and the splintering of this knowledge into what we now call the sciences and the arts/humanities. Finally, it also presumed that humans can predict and control nature as if it were a machine. This story promised, therefore, escape from the human condition: its limits of knowledge, its dependence on nature, its reliance upon community, and its acceptance of mortality, which all folk cultures, like Indigenous cultures, had respected as necessary for rebirth. Even the rise in writing and literacy in this period suggested an overcoming of the limits of time and space, as knowledge no longer relied on oral transmission. Human beings, this narrative suggested, could transcend the natural world, especially with the use of technology, and so Western Europeans began to believe that human history was a forward-pointing trajectory of progress and that the present was superior to the past, which they thus began to dismiss. This narrative was further solidified in the nineteenth century, in the narrow interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution as based on competition between individuals and between species. As a result, Western culture not only perpetuated the myth that humans were separate from and superior to nature, but suggested we had achieved this position through a kind of evolutionary ‘progress’ that involved pushing everyone else out of the way.17 This is the story of modernity, based on human separation and superiority, and it became the foundation of Western thinking as we know it today.

  • 18 At the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research conference held at the University of Al (...)
  • 19 Alexander Wolfe in Sheila Pratt, ‘ “Techno Fossils” Signal New Epoch, University of Alberta Scienti (...)
  • 20 The geologist later stated that it is science’s job to ‘ [define] the term so that it remains the s (...)

7 This story of schisms and hierarchies is, of course, also the story that our universities are founded upon,18 and academics are amongst its staunchest adherents and defenders. For example, one of the co-authors of the Science article mentioned above, which argues that the Anthropocene should be recognized as a distinct geological era, seemed determined to maintain the appearance of objectivity in commenting on the study’s findings; he stated in an interview, ‘We’re not saying [the Anthropocene] is good or bad. It’s about recording impartially a suite of massive changes on earth’.19 While reluctance to make a value statement when the ‘suite of massive changes’ includes the climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction of life on earth, and the loss of half of all wildlife in the past forty years seems incredible, it is the unsurprising result of the story of separation and superiority.20 And so we can see how the ecological crisis is not a problem that modernity can solve, but one that modernity created. To solve it, we need another story.

8The role of the humanities in turning things around, therefore, is clear. First of all, we need to recognize the ecological crisis as the cultural crisis that it is. Then we need to share this understanding across academia and publicly. Right now, this recognition is almost nonexistent. For example, consider the spring 2016 issue of the University of Alberta’s alumni magazine, New Trail, which focused on the importance of scientific research in predicting climate change and mitigating it for humans. Nowhere did this issue ask why we are in the midst of this crisis in the first place, and lacking altogether were Indigenous and humanities perspectives on how we might do things differently to avoid it. When I talked about the issue with Derek Thunder, the manager of the Aboriginal centre at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, where I work, he said he had noticed the same thing, and had already commented to his partner that the cover’s headline, above the image of a lone polar bear, reflected the same approach Canada historically took to ‘Indians’: ‘Move, Adapt, or Die’. These are the only options modernity gives. But we are not a biologically flawed species and incompatible with nature, and there is no inevitable naturally depleted, technologically focused future toward which we are moving. Instead, we are experiencing (and most of us are complicit in) a period in which a particular cultural story regarding humans’ relationship with nature is destroying the planet and ourselves. The solution is thus neither willful human extinction (as some have suggested), nor adaptation to a depleted planet, nor an attempt to simply mitigate our destruction, nor replacement of nature by technology (as if that were possible), but—to repeat the point above—a different cultural story.

  • 21 Recent politics have resulted in (although I would argue they are also caused by) increased loyalty (...)

9The challenge the humanities face in this role is to actually remain aware of the cultural frame ourselves. For we are in a paradoxical position: while our discipline’s overarching aim is to explore humans’ place in the world, it is, like science, a product of modernity, and it inherited the same story. Furthermore, we suffer a fundamental disadvantage: because the authority of science was privileged over the authority of the arts and humanities from the moment of the divide, and then because the empirical sciences in particular have been privileged for their utility to industrialization and corporate capitalism, we have ended up in a situation in which science is equated with knowledge (‘what does the science say?’) and the humanities have been continually devalued. So there is much pressure to mimic the sciences’ ‘objectivity’ and theoretical language, and to self-censor to avoid risking being perceived as ‘anti-science’ or ‘anti-technology’.21 That we have internalized this devaluing is, I think, evident in the fact that we have not yet recognized, as a discipline, the cultural nature of the ecological crisis, when it is so obvious. We need courage, therefore, to step up and take the lead in Anthropocene discourse (which we might rename); rather than running with the baton handed to us by science, we need to question the game. We need to engage our ability to recognize the constructed nature of epistemologies—that knowledge systems are stories—and that science is just part of one knowledge system, and is one, incomplete, way of knowing the world. In other words, it is critical that we remember that science exists within the realm of culture, not the other way around. What we are all subject to is not science, but natural laws, including the limits of functioning ecosystems. And then we need to discuss the ecological crisis as a crisis of modern culture. A culture must relate to the land in a way that respects natural laws and ensures functioning ecosystems, so that there is continued abundance rather than scarcity. This is what sustainability means. Unsustainability, of course, inevitably leads to collapse.

10Once it is clear in our minds that the ecological crisis is a cultural crisis, we will be prepared to avoid what environmental sociologists Magnus Boström and Debra Davidson call ‘conceptual traps’, which often appear in Anthropocene discourse, and which simply uphold the disastrous status quo and delay our chance to achieve right relationship with nature. Their list includes traps such as reductionism, conflation of issues, dualistic thinking, relativizing human actions, and grand theorizing. These conceptual traps occur in the three assumptions Macfarlane and others point out within the term Anthropocene itself (see above), and in particular within three forms of problematic thinking that are so prevalent in modern culture that I think they deserve closer attention. The first of these is thinking that human activities—the economy, or politics, or social systems—matter most. They do not. Functioning ecosystems matter most; they have to be our starting point. The diagram below (see Fig. 1) points out the nested relationship of priorities in a sustainable system:

Fig. 1 Hierarchy of priorities in a sustainable system. Diagram from City of
Edmonton, The Way We Green: The City of Edmonton’s Environmental
Strategic Plan (2011), p. 17, https://www.edmonton.ca/​city_government/​
documents/PDF/TheWayWeGreen-approved.pdf

  • 22 Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson, ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing environment-society relations’ (...)

11Nor can we assume that an inversion of the current prioritization of the economy over the environment is impossible; such pessimism that things cannot be different than the status quo reflects overly ‘rigid views of society’,22 when in fact values change all the time. For example, slavery was abolished in the United States even against the argument this abolition was ‘uneconomic’, and women won the right to vote.

  • 23 These systems are interrelated and often surprising. As one example: in diving to the bottom of the (...)
  • 24 As one example, the Klallam people of the Pacific Northwest invented fishing weirs effective enough (...)
  • 25 Ibid., p. 272.
  • 26 Dorothee Schreiber, ‘Hope and expectation on Turtle Island’, Niche (June 6, 2017), https://www.nich (...)

12The second example of problematic thinking is techno-optimism: that the ecological crisis can be fixed by technology. Techno-optimism contains multiple conceptual traps. Firstly, it is reductionist, failing to comprehend the complexity of natural systems23 and their irreplaceability by human ones; tied up in this thinking is cultural arrogance and ignorance that goes right back to the separation-and-superiority story. This thinking glosses over the loss of nature in favour of human ‘opportunities’. Techno-optimism also usually falls for the idea that human beings are fundamentally selfish or competitive or materialistic and that a focus on technology is more positive and realistic than a reliance on social change (which it views as negative and extreme). These points are simply untrue. We have language and families and communities and societies precisely because we are predominantly a collaborative rather than a competitive species. And history makes clear the modern industrial world is not unique in possessing ‘advanced’ technology—many Indigenous and traditional cultures, including those in the past, have had the technology to overdraw their resources, and so self-restraint became part of their belief system and was integrated into ceremonies to maintain sustainability; restraint is a cultural issue, not a biological one.24 Finally, techno-optimism fails to recognize the connection between technological solutions and power and politics; that is, that these so-called solutions serve to uphold existing power dynamics and undercut the deep change that is actually needed. For example, it fails to recognize that the authority of science these solutions invoke is frequently reductionist science that feeds corporate profit but is ‘not true, in a wider, ecological sense’,25 and it fails to recognize that these solutions usually reflect capitalist values and represent what Luigi Pellizzoni might call a neoliberal ‘enclosure’ of the natural commons, in which ‘ [n] ature itself is entrepreneurialized’.26 Unfortunately, we see techno-optimistic solutions everywhere. Now, as Crist states,

  • 27 To this list could also be added the push for autonomous cars (rather than intelligent public trans (...)
  • 28 Eileen Crist, ‘I walk in the world to love it’, in Protecting the Wild: Parks and Wilderness, The F (...)

Wherever we turn we find diverse expressions of this single strategy: whether it is the pitch for genetically modified crops to ‘feed the world’; the call for desalinization projects to solve freshwater shortages; the increase of aquaculture operations (fish factories) to generate “protein” for people; the manipulation of atmospheric composition to rectify climate disruption; the expansion and diversification of biofuel production to gas up the growing global car fleet; or the pressure to surrender remaining wilderness areas for people’s economic advancement.27 Unifying these superficially dissimilar projects is the human imperial mission to continue manipulating, invading, and unlocking the bounty of nature as the means to tackle humanity’s current and coming tribulations.28

13For all its talk of ‘disruption’, techno-optimistic thinking leaves untouched the cultural underpinnings of the ecological crisis—meaning it keeps us on the path to collapse, and is anything but disruptive, or realistic. We already know that techno-optimistic approaches are insufficient at resolving the ecological crisis. As environmental sociologist Ingolfur Blühdorn notes,

  • 29 Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘Sustaining the unsustainable: Symbolic politics and the politics of simulation’ (...)

Even in the richest and technologically most advanced countries, the strategies of ecological modernisation and environmental management have been unable to halt, let alone reverse, the trajectory of environmental consumption and destruction. Technological progress has not brought about sufficiently intelligent solutions.29

14The opposite of techno-optimism is not ‘anti-technology’ (which would be its own conceptual trap) but techno-skepticism, which we might also simply call critical thinking, in which we carefully consider and evaluate whether or not the technology fundamentally serves us, rather than blind acceptance of it and reliance upon it, without much thinking at all.

  • 30 This theory first rose to prominence with the 2004 publication of Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nor (...)
  • 31 Boström and Davidson (2018), p. 15, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3.
  • 32 Luigi Pellizzoni, ‘Connecting people with things: The commons and environmental sociology’, in Envi (...)

15The third example of problematic thinking is the perversion of the human-nature relationship that arises out of postenvironmental theory.30 This theory perhaps superficially sounds promising, as it urges that humans are not separate from nature—except that it then suggests that the nature part does not exist at all. This problematic thinking, to which academics seem particularly susceptible, involves ‘grand theorizing’31 that justifies continued human-centeredness, entitlement and colonialism. Promoted by Timothy Morton, Emma Marris and others, it represents dangerous, false reconciliation; it ‘is resolved not in the direction of conceiving of human-nonhuman relationship as a gathering on equal footing, as many non-western cultures do […] but of a complete loss of autonomy and distinction of the natural’.32 This thinking often promotes universal principles rather than place-based knowing, it ignores the past and subscribes to the narrative of progress, and because it relativizes human actions (suggesting everything we do is ‘natural’) it allows no room for critique of technology (which I myself witnessed recently, when I noted on social media that cellphones create huge amounts of environmental waste and a colleague sent me a ‘friendly reminder’ warning against the ‘pathologization of technology’); it thus also upholds techno-optimism. We can see this thinking right here in Edmonton, with the decision to run an LRT through the North Saskatchewan River Valley, destroying an old-growth forest and an important link in the wildlife corridor, in order to expand ‘modern’ public transit, and we see it again in the proposal to rezone ninety-nine acres of river valley habitat for a solar power plant. And unfortunately, rather than recognizing the human-centeredness and neoliberal enclosure of the natural commons inherent in this thinking and then speaking against it as public intellectuals, some academics have defended it. For example, one colleague stated we need solar power and suggested that concerns with the river valley power plant reflected ‘the human-created fantasy of an untouchable nature’. This statement perfectly represents grand theorizing. And, as Crist notes, it is ‘bogus reasoning’ to suggest that ‘those who defend the natural world from human assimilation’ believe in a ‘human-nature dichotomy’, and the accusation

  • 33 Crist (2015), p. 6.

has worked only to discourage deeper thinking about our relationship with the biosphere. For it requires virtually no thought to say, ‘Humans and nature are not separate, therefore no wonder everything looks the way it does’. But it requires critical reflection to discern that the millennia-old stance of human entitlement, with its proliferated conceptions of ‘the Human Difference’ and its amoral instrumentalism, has all but utterly divorced humans from nature—therefore no wonder everything looks the way it does.33

  • 34 Pellizzoni (2018), p. 294.

16In other words, the point is not that humans are part of nature and so everything we do is fine, it is that humans are part of nature, and so we have to be careful to act respectfully and avoid harm. Of course we need public transit, but that which uses existing transportation corridors and replaces cars rather than parks and forests. Of course we need solar power, but on rooftops and brownfields, not in riparian habitat. What about the deer and coyotes and blue herons and barred owls who live on this land? Where is there any reflection of right relationship, of respect, reciprocity, and care in this thinking? As Pellizzoni notes, this kind of ambivalent takeover of nature for human use is ‘perhaps the most dramatic enclosure of all’ because it seems to extend to ‘humans’ own mindset and imagination’.34

  • 35 Future Earth, ‘Future Earth products’, Future Earth, 50–1: 06, https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org (...)
  • 36 Breakthrough Institute, ‘About us’, Breakthrough Institute, https://www.thebreakthrough.org/about.
  • 37 Crist (2016), p. 15.

17Humanities scholars, in taking on our role to help resolve the ecological crisis, will not only have to avoid these conceptual traps ourselves, but also push back against them on all fronts—because they are already ubiquitous in academia and wider society. Corporations and political leaders have seized upon the above ideas, particularly eager to take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ that techno-optimism represents. Today, this thinking is well financed, as evidenced by support for ‘ecomodern’ research centres such as Future Earth and the Breakthrough Institute. Future Earth seems to actually celebrate (however incoherently) the Anthropocene as an achievement; as one of the speakers in its promotional video for its magazine, Anthropocene: Innovation in the Human Age states, ‘what an amazing juncture in which to be alive; humanity was mostly a dribble, for most of its existence, and then there’s been “zoom”. And now within the lives of most everyone who’s alive right now, something different is coming’.35 Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute defines itself as ‘a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges’36 and it has attracted dozens of ‘progressive’ researchers from across academic disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, who have embraced a ‘managerial mindset’ toward nature.37 In the real world, this translates into continued rationalizing of human-centered land use and adoption of technology without considering, or actively disregarding, the impact on other species and ecosystems. This thinking also perpetuates colonialism and ignores Indigenous rights.

  • 38 Blühdorn (2007), abstract.
  • 39 Ibid., p. 253.
  • 40 Ibid., p. 263.

18These conceptual traps are also pervasive in policy-making and are backed by what Blühdorn calls ‘symbolic politics’ and ‘politics of simulation’, which aim to reassure the public that leaders are acting on the ecological crisis yet uphold ‘the core principles of democratic consumer capitalism’ that in fact undermine authentic ecological solutions, ultimately helping to ‘sustain what is known to be unsustainable’.38 Blühdorn presents these politics as both an intentional ‘performance’ to defend the status quo, as well as—and this ties to the central point of this paper—the result of a cultural inability to seriously question the status quo.39 We are so thoroughly socialized that genuine challenges to the established system have virtually disappeared; we have instead normalized the ecological crisis and allow it to serve existing power structures through focus on ‘narratives of technological efficiency, […] corporate responsibility, ethical consumption, fair trade, ethical investment, green consumerism, etc.’.40 These superficial ‘solutions’, along with all of the above examples of problematic thinking, represent an immature attempt to avoid the cultural reckoning of modernity that the ecological crisis is insisting we must undertake. They do not create a right relationship with the land; they prolong disconnection and continue to cause harm.

  • 41 Macfarlane (2016).
  • 42 Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). https://doi.o (...)
  • 43 Amitav Ghosh, ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’, The Guardian (October 28, 2016), https: (...)
  • 44 Ibid.
  • 45 Ibid.
  • 46 The eternal irony, or perhaps prescience, is that the first novel, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixot (...)
  • 47 Ghosh (2016).

19The damage caused by attempting to avoid a reckoning of the cultural story of modernity is not only evident in the ecological crisis, but also in ourselves, in a deepening cognitive dissonance. This is evident in how modern culture deals with the ecological crisis not only in science, but also in literature and art. Consider, for example, the tendency for literary conference panels to position Anthropocene discourse alongside dystopian fiction, seemingly regarding the collapse of the natural world as just another ‘scarcity narrative’.41 In this way, the ecological crisis is reconfigured as a creative landscape to be imaginatively explored, perhaps even as a viable or inevitable future. In some cases, such a future is even seen as preferable: Donna Haraway’s suggestion that a ‘cyborg’ world, blurring boundaries between humans and machines, would be good for feminism regards the artificial as not only a sufficient replacement for nature, but superior to it.42 As Indian writer Amitav Ghosh noted in 2016, most modern literature seems unable to effectively deal with the ecological crisis: ‘the literary mainstream, even as it has become more engagé on many fronts, remains just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large’,43 and at the heart of this crisis is a ‘broader imaginative and cultural failure’.44 Ghosh suggests that this failure relates to modern literature’s—particularly the novel’s— reliance on ‘concealment’ of large events in favour of everyday life, so that it reflects ‘a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all’;45 he notes how hard it is, for example, for a novel to realistically invoke even a cataclysmic weather event. What Ghosh is ultimately pointing to is the effect of modernity’s separation-and-superiority story. The novel arose as a genre in the seventeenth century and centers on the individual protagonist disconnected from nature; the story thus leaves no room for engagement with natural phenomena or anything related to the spiritual or an enchanted nature.46 The disconnection upheld by this worldview explains why literary works dealing with environmental collapse are ‘banished’ to ‘fantasy, horror, and science fiction’,47 as if imminent ecological collapse was not actually real.

  • 48 Edward Burtynsky, https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/events

20 This same deepened disconnection is likewise evident in what is perhaps the best-known public art project of the Anthropocene so far, the photographs of Edward Burtynsky. The photos, which show the ruin of the planet as aesthetically pleasing patterns from above, suggest a god-like gaze, so that even while drawing attention to the destruction modern industrial culture has wrought on a grand scale, the photos uphold assumptions of human power. Usually missing, meanwhile, are the other-than-human victims of the destruction; it is as if they never existed. Burtynsky has gained fame for his works: in September 2018 he had six exhibits in three countries, and 2018 also saw his Anthropocene Project turned into a documentary of the same name.48 The perspective in his photos depends upon separation, and indeed privilege. There is no ground-level acknowledgement of the suffering, no connection, no intervention, no alternative presented; the photos exacerbate abstraction rather than encourage action, and almost everyone I know who has seen the film said they felt numb afterward. We need less numbing, not more; we need waking up to the fact that the damage is real and then collective action to change course.

  • 49 Karen Bartko, ‘ “Lovely morning in the apocalypse”: Edmonton wakes up to orange, smoky sky’, Global (...)
  • 50 In Eleanor Ainge Roy, ‘What is the sea telling us?’, The Guardian (January 3, 2019),https://www.the (...)
  • 51 Lauren O’Neil, ‘Dolphin calf dies after tourists use it for selfies’, CBC (February 19, 2016) https (...)
  • 52 In Baker (2018), 15: 10–15: 50.
  • 53 Zhiwa Woodbury, ‘The talking cure for the climate crisis’, Truthout (April 14, 2016), https://www.t (...)

21The problem with delayed reckoning of the modern cultural story is that the inevitable response is numbness; since the damage is so overwhelming, the only possible reaction to stave off despair while remaining within this story is deep denial. And we see evidence of this denial everywhere. See, for example, news stories from August 2018 that compared the smoke in Edmonton from forest fires in British Columbia to a ‘zombie apocalypse’ without a single mention of climate change or global warming.49 Or Maori Elder and whale expert Hori Parata’s statement regarding tourists’ response to the surge in mass whale strandings on New Zealand beaches: ‘ “These days it is like a zoo. People just want to come and gawk at us, without even trying to understand what is happening with the animals and the environment”’.50 Or the death of a baby dolphin in 2016 after hordes of people on a beach in Argentina took it from the water to take selfies with it.51 It is as if the fires were a TV show, the animals simply memes on social media. While we may gape and gawk, the objectification of nature prevents us from feeling any deep pain; as ecopsychologist Zhiwa Woodbury notes, it is a strategy for cognitively keeping the ecological crisis at arm’s length.52 Woodbury notes this disconnection has deepened to the level of extreme collective dissociation.53 He is right; look at how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks about the climate crisis in its 2018 Global Warming of 1.5° Celsius: Summary for Policymakers—keeping in mind the purpose of this document is essentially to state what the world needs to do to prevent global ecological collapse:

  • 54 IPCC, Global Warming at 1.5° Celsius: Summary for Policy Makers (Geneva: IPCC, 2018), p. 11, https: (...)

B3.1. Of 105,000 species studied, 6 % of insects, 8 % of plants and 4 % of vertebrates are projected to lose over half of their climatically determined geographic range for global warming of 1.5°C, compared with 18 % of insects, 16 % of plants and 8 % of vertebrates for global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). Impacts associated with other biodiversity-related risks such as forest fires, and the spread of invasive species, are lower at 1.5°C compared to 2°C of global warming (high confidence). {3.4.3, 3.5.2}54

22Where is the care in this language? Where is the understanding of right relationship? The modern cultural belief that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature, which caused the problems in the first place, prevents them.

  • 55 Milner-Gulland in Jeremy Hance, ‘Proving the “shifting baselines” theory: How humans consistently m (...)
  • 56 As Mary Annette Pember notes, ‘In the tradition of a Western-based worldview, people, especially ac (...)
  • 57 ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ fails to recognize that Indigenous and other traditional cultures, whi (...)

23We have labelled this condition of separation as ‘nature deficit disorder’ and as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ (in which each generation assumes a progressively depleted ‘normal’ state of nature—so that we risk ‘sleepwalking through the destruction of the natural world without taking action to remedy the situation’55) but without the recognition that the disconnection from nature and widespread amnesia are not unexpected consequences or isolated phenomena, but are instead built right in to modern culture.56 They are simply the result of the modern cultural story of human separation and superiority and its belief in ‘progress’—that is, a culture founded on objectifying nature and dismissing or mocking the past.57 And because of the built-in taboos to even critique the modern cultural story—through, for example, name-calling accusations of anthropomorphism, or bias, or romanticizing the past, or reverting to old-fashioned or ‘medieval’ thinking—we continue to cause harm to both nature and ourselves. Because we are caught in a feedback loop of destruction, the disconnection only deepens: we further objectify nature, so we rationalize more harm, including through language that both silences other voices and downplays the harm, and in so doing we numb our own consciences, and then we forget even the memory of other ways of being and seeing and knowing. As Crist states,

  • 58 As Kingsnorth (n.d.) notes, many of us have forgotten how to even hear old stories of an enchanted (...)
  • 59 Crist (2016), pp. 17–19.

How true the cliché that history is written by the victors, and how much truer for the history of the planet’s conquest against which no nonhuman can direct a flood of grievances that might strike a humbling note into the human soul […] Anthropocene discourse veers away from environmentalism’s dark idiom of destruction, depredation, rape, loss, devastation, deterioration, and so forth of the natural world into the tame vocabulary that humans are changing, shaping, transforming, or altering the biosphere, and, in the process, creating novel ecosystems and anthropogenic biomes […] [Non-human beings] have been de facto silenced because if they once spoke to us in other registers—primitive, symbolic, sacred, totemic, sensual, or poetic—they have receded so much they no longer convey such numinous turns of speech, and are certainly unable by now to rival the digital sirens of Main Street.58 The centuries-old global downshifting of the ecological baseline of the historically sponsored, cumulative loss of Life is a graveyard of more than extinct life forms and the effervescence of the wild. But such gossamer intimations lie almost utterly forgotten, with even the memory of their memory swiftly disappearing. So also the Earth’s forgetting projects itself into humanity’s future, where the forgetting itself will be forgotten for as long as the Earth can be disciplined into remaining a workable and safe human stage. Or so apparently it is hoped, regarding both the forgetting and the disciplining.59

  • 60 Rita Wong and Fred Wah, Beholden: A Poem as Long as the River (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2018), p. 96
  • 61 Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003), p. (...)

24It is urgent that those of us in the humanities recognize the ecological crisis as a cultural crisis—as the inevitable endpoint of modern culture’s separation-and-superiority story. While this story, the ‘tall tale of progress’,60 pulled off the illusion of working for awhile (for those who are part of that culture, and not the humans and other creatures colonized or repressed or decimated by it), that was only because of the earth’s natural abundance, especially in places that had been stewarded by Indigenous people for millennia. As that abundance has now been eroded, the problem with the narrative—which one could also see as a problem with accounting, because one cannot simply take without giving back forever—is now glaringly obvious. A forward line of ‘progress’, rather than a circle enabling regeneration, will always end in exhaustion. We are at a reckoning point, and it could not be more clear that the separation-and-superiority story is a dysfunctional story. We might even say it is a lie. The proof, the feedback, is the ecological crisis itself—the climate crisis, mass extinction, the loss of half the world’s wildlife—as well as human cultural and psychological losses. This same story is never going to offer a way out; it can’t. So we need to be the voices of all those who have been harmed and destroyed by this story, and call it out loud and clear. This might be, to paraphrase Thomas Berry, the humanities’ great work. And then, as Thomas King notes and as is emphasized above, we need to tell a different story. We’ve created the ‘environmental ethics’, ‘business ethics’, ‘political ethics’, and all the ‘other codes of conduct suggested by our actions […] We’ve created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn’t come out of nowhere. They didn’t arrive from another planet. Want a different ethic? Tell a different story’.61

  • 62 Kingsnorth (n.d.).
  • 63 Peter Denton, Technology and Sustainability (Toronto: Rocky Mountain Books, 2014), p. 19.
  • 64 Crist (2016), p. 28.
  • 65 Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘Corn tastes better on the honor system’, Emergence, https://www.emergencemaga (...)

25While, as Paul Kingsnorth says, a new cultural narrative cannot simply be consciously constructed as a grand project (he knows, because he tried it with the Dark Mountain Project), awareness and articulation of an alternative can create a movement, and then even deep cultural change can happen when ‘lots and lots of small stories come together to form something bigger’,62 for ‘stories mobilize us to live toward the possibilities they contain’.63 The alternative narrative we need to make way for now is not new. Rather, it is an ancient story that has worked for cultures around the world for millennia and has persisted in the margins all along, persecuted by modernity. Essentially, the story is: of course nature exists, and we are simply part of it. This is the ecocentric story, containing ‘profound deference for the living world’64 within which we see ourselves as merely embedded, and it enables right relationship. This story seeks to know the world holistically, as Potawatomi writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, through ‘mind, body, emotion, and spirit’ rather than just intellectually.65 This story remembers the past and connects deeply with place, and because it recognizes the triumph of rebirth in nature rather than fearing death, it is a circle rather than an arrow. This story sees the land as caring for us, and reciprocates care back for the land. It recognizes the truth that destruction of nature and erasure of connection with it is an ongoing act of colonialism. It faces the pain of the harm we have caused, and mourns the losses, for feeling ecological grief is ‘a legitimate response to ecological loss’ and it

  • 66 Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo, ‘Hope and mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding ecological (...)

reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive.66

  • 67 See Wong and Wah (2018); the authors said the language they used came from the Columbia River itsel (...)
  • 68 Despite Haraway’s statement that ‘We cannot go back ideologically or materially’ (2016, p. 30), the (...)
  • 69 Wendell Berry in Robert Macfarlane, ‘The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of (...)

26But this story does not remain in despair. The story itself, because it is based on deep connection rather than intellectual abstraction, guides us to act. Action takes many forms: paying careful attention to the land in everything we do; working together to clean up the mess we have caused and restoring the ecological health of the landscape; and standing up as humble human beings, physically putting our bodies on the line to defend the land and its creatures, not because they are our garden to tend, as Emma Marris says, but because they are our relations. Action matters, I would now argue to Rudy Wiebe, because it changes the way we know a place—and thus changes our stories, the place, and us.67 Healing begins.68 The feedback loop for this story is regenerative and creative: as people forge deep cultural connections with nature, including through ‘particularizing’69 and poetic rather than abstract language and art and active care for nature, nature becomes richer and better able to care for the people, and this in turn inspires deeper connection. This story is thus deeply positive. Telling a different story brings a different world to life. And if we make our priority not passively observing the human-centered, deathly geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, but rather actively ushering in a new cultural era, one of right relationship that enables the flourishing of life, which we might call the Era of Regeneration, we finally have a chance of turning everything around.

  • 70 Mueller makes a similar point, noting humans appeared in the Americas around twelve thousand years (...)
  • 71 Wall Kimmerer (2014), p. 345.

27Indigenous storytellers are the first sources to turn to for this story. Besides opening academia up more fully to oral storytelling, we can learn from books by Indigenous authors. Works like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass or Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on our Turtle’s Back show that if we listen, we will hear what other creatures have to say, and realize they are our teachers because they have existed for so much longer than we have.70 These authors also show how stories that include the agency of other beings are more meaningful and deeply satisfying in all the ways that the story of separation and superiority is empty. Wall Kimmerer, who is both a botanist and a keeper of traditional Potawatomi wisdom, asks, ‘what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else’.71 Holistic knowing allows us to better understand what to value and how to act, and reveals that a lot of things we think we can’t live without are actually burdens rather than gifts, and that real gifts take a very different form.

  • 72 Kingsnorth (n.d.).
  • 73 Roger Deakin, Waterlog (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 262.
  • 74 Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 120.
  • 75 Common Ground, Common Ground, www.commonground.org.uk/what-we-do/

28 Traditional European literature also offers stories of connection and agency of nature, ‘that old animal, emotional, spiritual connection to the natural world’ that is ‘the heart of things’.72 One writer who tapped into English folklore interconnecting culture and nature is Roger Deakin, and his writings about his daily life present a model of right relationship. In his book Waterlog, for example, the humbleness with which he regarded his place on earth is evident in his desire to allow wild animals to share his farmhouse with him; when he catches himself feeling impatient for the swallows that nest in his chimney to migrate in fall so that he might make a fire, he says, ‘However, whenever such selfish sentiments creep up, I remind myself that I’m a mere newcomer to this ancient dynasty of nomads, who settled here centuries before I ever appeared on the scene and will, I sincerely hope, long outlast me here’.73 Because Deakin embodied right relationship, he was also necessarily an activist; he said, ‘A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are’.74 He co-founded an eco-arts group called Common Ground to resist ‘the footloose excesses of development’ and foster ‘local distinctiveness’, through preservation of those aspects of the land and of our culture that suggest an ‘age-old intertwining of human life and the natural world’.75

  • 76 The terms biologist Ludwig Carbyn said another scientist used when Carbyn referenced Aldo Leopold ( (...)
  • 77 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1970), p. 279.
  • 78 Ibid., p. 239.
  • 79 Ibid., p. 251.
  • 80 Ibid., p. 262.
  • 81 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett, 1962), p. 95.

29There are also settler writers who have long been ignored or considered ‘unrealistic’ and ‘irrelevant’76 in academia precisely because they connected ethics and nature. Aldo Leopold, in his 1949 A Sand County Almanac, described the ‘shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land’77 versus the intellectually humble scholar who recognizes humans’ role as mere participants in a community that includes the ‘soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’;78 he also recognized that right relationship is not just an intellectual pursuit, but also an embodied, emotional and spiritual one: ‘We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in’.79 And he articulated a crystal-clear land ethic: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.80 Likewise, Rachel Carson, in her 1962 Silent Spring, noted that pesticide spraying raises ‘a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized’.81 She also stated,

  • 82 Ibid., p. 218.

In some quarters nowadays it is fashionable to dismiss the balance of nature as a state of affairs that prevailed in an earlier, simpler world, a state that has now been so thoroughly upset that we might as well forget it. Some find this a convenient assumption, but as a chart for a course of action it is highly dangerous. The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a man perched on the edge of a cliff.82

  • 83 Ibid., p. 261.
  • 84 Ibid., p. 243.

30She noted the arrogance inherent in the phrase ‘control of nature’83 and emphasized that ‘We need a more high-minded orientation and a deeper insight, which I miss in many researchers. Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it […] Humbleness is in order; there is no excuse for scientific conceit here’.84

  • 85 For example, see Kristine Kowalchuk, ‘Cloverdale Bridge’, Edmonton City as Museum Project (May 26, (...)
  • 86 TransEd, the multinational consortium undertaking the work, includes Bombardier, EllisDon, and Bech (...)

31The stories that we need to make way for are already there, waiting for us to learn from them and be inspired from them in our own story-making. I myself have been inspired and changed by the stories above; I can no longer just write, I now need to try to actively right. So when Edmonton’s city council decided to run its LRT through the North Saskatchewan River Valley, knocking down an old-growth forest and the popular Cloverdale footbridge—a place that in many ways symbolized right relationship, by connecting people with nature right in the heart of the city—I wrote about it,85 but I also founded a group called Save the Footbridge. We started a petition and social media campaign, we created buttons and stickers, we organized summer concerts and other events on the footbridge, we spoke to the media and at public hearings, and we protested the ground-breaking.86 And since the footbridge was carved with hearts and initials dating back forty years, I called northern Alberta artist Peter von Tiesenhausen, who in 1996 copyrighted his land to protect it from oil and gas companies, to explore the possibility of copyrighting the footbridge as a collaborative public art piece. Von Tiesenhausen is in some ways the antithesis of Edward Burtynsky: rather than looking down on places around the world, he creates art from his farm, with which he has an intimate and reciprocal relationship; in a phone interview in 2016, he said he ‘borrows from the land’, which he considers ‘sacred’, and that he ‘gives back to it’. The land he is on ‘is the place that has nurtured me since I was a baby, and has given me everything I’ve ever needed’. He was encouraging, and said, ‘we have to fight for these things […] Everything is impossible until it’s not’.

  • 87 In Schreiber (2017).

32We did not succeed in stopping the destruction of the footbridge, or the old growth forest, and I will forevermore be haunted by the sight of robins and chickadees that fluttered around the destruction that perfect spring morning when the chainsaws arrived and the trees came down. But we did manage, I think, to shift the collective story about our relationship to the river valley and the need to think more carefully about the type of public transit we develop. Thousands of people signed our petition. Two of my former students joined our group; one later began researching illicit writing in the river valley, including the graffiti on the footbridge railings; the other organized a storytelling event on the footbridge and has since published a fictional book, The Melting Queen, in which the bridge appears. At one of our concerts on the footbridge, members of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra showed up to play. Another group played the bridge itself, using their drumsticks on the metal beams and wooden slats and the bicycles passing by. They said the bridge made a beautiful sound; the hollowness of the beams meant it reverberated in a special way. And what became increasingly clear was that people loved the place, and that the more time we spent together on the footbridge and in the vicinity of the woods and river, the more we all cared about saving it. The story of separation got in the way—while Blackfoot activist Duane Good Striker, who performed a ceremony on the footbridge, urged us to stand up for the land, most of our group’s supporters drew the line at risking arrest, so only two of us actually defended it the day the trees came down (and were arrested). If there had been 100 of us, I am certain we would have won. Since then, I have taken solace in Erica Violet Lee’s words that ‘there is nothing and no one beyond healing’.87 Our group has now formed the Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition, which is part of the Alberta Environmental Network, and Edmontonians for Responsible Urban Public Transit, and in 2017 my colleague Sarah Krotz and I began organizing free public talks about the river valley at the University of Alberta (we’ve done ten so far; an early version of this paper was the first one presented). And I now talk about ecocentrism and the footbridge and civil disobedience in the courses I teach. So that next time, 100 people, then 1000 people, will be there. Because action, not abstraction, is part of the right story.

33I did not ask von Tiesenhausen how he thought we might collectively turn toward a right relationship with nature. But at one point in the interview, he said: we need to ‘look at the biggest picture we can think of, and start there’. This struck me as precisely how an artist would describe holistic thinking. The ‘biggest picture’ includes seeing all of nature as our relations, as a complex system of which we are just a part, and as the beautiful home in which we belong. And this is the right story—the one we need to relearn, for it is not the land, but we who must change. And when we begin with the biggest picture, the right story is the one we will find ourselves in.

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Woodbury, Zhiwa, ‘The talking cure for the climate crisis’, Truthout (April 14, 2016), https://www.truthout.org/articles/the-talking-cure-for-the-climate-crisis/

Notes

1 Quaker Earthcare Witness, Living in Right Relationship (n.d.), https://www.quakerearthcare.org/article/living-right-relationship.

2 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, IGBP Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17, https://www.igbp.net/download/18.3 16f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf.

3 Colin N. Waters et al., ‘The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene’, Science, 351 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad2622.

4 Ralph Lidskog and Claire Waterton, ‘The Anthropocene: A narrative in the making’, in Environment and Society, ed. by Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 25–46 (p. 26), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3.

5 Personal communication, March 23, 2017.

6 Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever’, The Guardian (April 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever.

7 Eileen Crist, ‘On the poverty of our nomenclature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. by Jason Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), pp. 14–30 (pp. 14, 28). As an example, Crist quotes geologist Jan Zalasiewicz’s statement that ‘we are so adept at using energy and manipulating the environment that we are now a defining force in the geological process on the surface of the Earth’. She notes that ‘factoring in a candid admission of our powerlessness to create (or even imagine) another way of life [his statement might instead] yield: “we are so impotent to control our numbers, appetites, and plundering technologies, and so indifferent to our swallowing up the more-than-human world, that we are now a colonizing force in the biosphere stripping it of its biological wealth and potential, as well as of its extraordinary beauty and creative art”’ (p. 23).

8 Alex Blasdel, ‘ “A reckoning for our species”: The philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene’, The Guardian (June 15, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene-philosopher.

9 In Paul Schmelzer, ‘Omaa Akiing: Paul Schmelzer interviews Winona LaDuke’, in Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, ed. by Max Andrews (London: RSA, 2006), pp. 62–67 (p. 65).

10 Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016), p. 238.

11 Macfarlane (2016).

12 Paul Kingsnorth, ‘The myth of progress’, Emergence, https://www.emergencemagazine.org/story/the-myth-of-progress

13 Pope Francis, however, suggests in his encyclical Laudato Sí: On Care for our Common Home that the meaning of ‘dominion over the earth’ has been distorted by some Christians and that God’s intention was for humans to live in harmony with nature(https://www.w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html).

14 Martin Lee Mueller, Being Salmon Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), p. 53.

15 In Schmelzer (2006), p. 65.

16 My own research on seventeenth-century women’s recipes suggests that we might see modernity’s denunciation of myth, folk knowledge, and connection with nature as an overthrowing of traditional women’s authority. For a brief reflection on this research, see Kristine Kowalchuk, ‘The recipe as feminist text: A reflection on the writing of Preserving on Paper’, The Recipes Project (May 10, 2017), https://www.recipes.hypotheses.org/9978.

17 Lessons from wolves show that this focus on competition is wrong. Wolf pack behavior reveals complex intra-species collaboration rather than simple competition, while the positive impact of the reintroduction of wolves on Yellowstone National Park shows that ecosystems depend upon more complex inter-species relationships than science previously thought. Meanwhile, research by Suzanne Simard has shown how trees also communicate and cooperate as communities, throwing into question hierarchical thinking that places animals above plants. And quantum physics has shown that ‘There are no things; there are only relations’ (Zhiwa Woodbury in Baker, Carolyn, ‘Healing climate trauma: Beyond climate change toward truth and reconciliation with Zhiwa Woodbury’, YouTube, May 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnae_Fg8iUI, at 45: 50–46: 02). These lessons were already contained in Indigenous and traditional understanding of interconnectivity within and between species.

18 At the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research conference held at the University of Alberta in 2017, Papaschase Cree professor Dwayne Donald asked in a keynote speech ‘What do universities do to wisdom?’ and ‘On whose terms do we expect reconciliation to happen?’ He then answered his own questions, saying, ‘Universities are hard places to enable traditional knowledge’ (October 27, 2017).

19 Alexander Wolfe in Sheila Pratt, ‘ “Techno Fossils” Signal New Epoch, University of Alberta Scientist Says’, Edmonton Journal (January 7, 2016), https://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/new-geological-era-embargo-2-pm-jan-7

20 The geologist later stated that it is science’s job to ‘ [define] the term so that it remains the same thing for all those who use it’ and that it is then the job of the social sciences and humanities and arts to do something with it—reflecting the idea that the science comes first (personal communication, January 8, 2016). But that he himself recognized problems with this way of thinking is evident in an earlier statement that the ecological crisis is ‘not so much a science issue as a geopolitical and even ethical one’ (personal communication, February 22, 2015).

21 Recent politics have resulted in (although I would argue they are also caused by) increased loyalty to ‘objectivity’ in arts and humanities. For example, one of the speakers in a 2017 University of Alberta alumni podcast called ‘Fake news: How did we get here?’ (University of Alberta (January 28, 2017) https://www.folio.ca/fake-news-how-did-we-get-here/) blamed the teaching of post-modernism in humanities courses for the erosion of truth; she urged greater reliance on objectivity and resisted the point that just because something has not been proven by science, that does not mean it cannot be true. She did not seem to recognize that the problem is perhaps less ‘post-truth’ than ‘post-critical thinking’, or even ‘post-wisdom’, which involves an ability to evaluate so-called truth and fact, and the need for deepened discussion of subjectivity and objectivity, and the possibilities and limits of each.

22 Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson, ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing environment-society relations’ in Environment and Society, ed. by Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 1–24 (p. 13), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3.

23 These systems are interrelated and often surprising. As one example: in diving to the bottom of the ocean, whales stir up plankton, which, at the surface, absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide. ‘When the numbers of great whales were at their historical peaks, they might have removed several tens of millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year’ (Mueller (2017) p. 73).

24 As one example, the Klallam people of the Pacific Northwest invented fishing weirs effective enough to fish out salmon stocks in a few seasons; the flourishing of both people and salmon for over seven millennia thus ‘suggests that there were intact social structures in place that not only fostered knowledge of technology’s propensity for overshoot, but that effectively translated such knowledge into a functional ethics’ (Mueller (2017), pp. 200–202). Their rituals of interconnectedness provided a check on the power of their technology.

25 Ibid., p. 272.

26 Dorothee Schreiber, ‘Hope and expectation on Turtle Island’, Niche (June 6, 2017), https://www.niche-canada.org/2017/06/06/hope-and-expectation-on-turtle-island/

27 To this list could also be added the push for autonomous cars (rather than intelligent public transit and responsible urban design) and support for nuclear energy (rather than decentralized energy production and decreased consumption).

28 Eileen Crist, ‘I walk in the world to love it’, in Protecting the Wild: Parks and Wilderness, The Foundation for Conservation, ed. By G. Wuerthner, E. Crist and T. Butler (Washington: Island Press, 2015), pp. 2–10 (p. 8), https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-551-9.

29 Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘Sustaining the unsustainable: Symbolic politics and the politics of simulation’, Environmental Politics, 16.2 (2007), 251–275 (p. 252), https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701211759.

30 This theory first rose to prominence with the 2004 publication of Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s manifesto, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws. com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf

31 Boström and Davidson (2018), p. 15, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3.

32 Luigi Pellizzoni, ‘Connecting people with things: The commons and environmental sociology’, in Environment and Society, ed. by Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 281–304 (p. 294). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3.

33 Crist (2015), p. 6.

34 Pellizzoni (2018), p. 294.

35 Future Earth, ‘Future Earth products’, Future Earth, 50–1: 06, https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/about-us/.

36 Breakthrough Institute, ‘About us’, Breakthrough Institute, https://www.thebreakthrough.org/about.

37 Crist (2016), p. 15.

38 Blühdorn (2007), abstract.

39 Ibid., p. 253.

40 Ibid., p. 263.

41 Macfarlane (2016).

42 Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816650477.001.0001 .

43 Amitav Ghosh, ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’, The Guardian (October 28, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/amitav-ghosh-where-is-the-fiction-about-climate-change-.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 The eternal irony, or perhaps prescience, is that the first novel, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is all about the delusion of humans perceiving themselves as heroic.

47 Ghosh (2016).

48 Edward Burtynsky, https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/events

49 Karen Bartko, ‘ “Lovely morning in the apocalypse”: Edmonton wakes up to orange, smoky sky’, Global News (August 15, 2018), https://www.globalnews.ca/news/4388625/edmonton-apocalypse-sky-wildfire-smoke/.

50 In Eleanor Ainge Roy, ‘What is the sea telling us?’, The Guardian (January 3, 2019),https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/03/what-is-the-sea-telling-us-maori-tribes-fearful-over-whale-strandings.

51 Lauren O’Neil, ‘Dolphin calf dies after tourists use it for selfies’, CBC (February 19, 2016) https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/dolphin-calf-dies-after-tourists-use-it-for-selfies-1.3456188.

52 In Baker (2018), 15: 10–15: 50.

53 Zhiwa Woodbury, ‘The talking cure for the climate crisis’, Truthout (April 14, 2016), https://www.truthout.org/articles/the-talking-cure-for-the-climate-crisis/.

54 IPCC, Global Warming at 1.5° Celsius: Summary for Policy Makers (Geneva: IPCC, 2018), p. 11, https://www.report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf.

55 Milner-Gulland in Jeremy Hance, ‘Proving the “shifting baselines” theory: How humans consistently misperceive nature’, Mongabay (June 24, 2009), https://www.news.mongabay.com/2009/06/proving-the-shifting-baselines-theory-how-humans-consistently-misperceive-nature/.

56 As Mary Annette Pember notes, ‘In the tradition of a Western-based worldview, people, especially academics, construct pathologies and syndromes to objectify and compartmentalize our humanness’; when the result of isolating ourselves from nature is depression and a longing for connection, it is hard for Indigenous people to not do ‘a collective eye roll while voicing an exasperated, “Duh, ya think?”’. Mary Annette Pember, ‘How native and white communities make alliances to protect the Earth’, EcoWatch (December 21, 2018), https://www.ecowatch.com/community-alliances-protect-the-earth-2624052967.html

57 ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ fails to recognize that Indigenous and other traditional cultures, which ritually remember the past, have avoided the problems of ecological degradation in the first place. Thus, consider the irony: ‘The proof of the shifting baselines theory requires that human experience of nature must be backed up by empirical evidence in order to be understood as accurate. Clearly, human perception of nature is subject to all sorts of failings, due to short life spans, poor communication (generational amnesia), and unreliable memory (personal amnesia)’ (Hance, 2009).

58 As Kingsnorth (n.d.) notes, many of us have forgotten how to even hear old stories of an enchanted nature; ‘we tend to want to rationally analyze and imagine that we can intellectually grasp and understand every aspect of something that we hear in order for it to make sense, but that’s not necessarily the case’. He suggests the way to relearn is to ‘ [shut] our mouths for a while and [be] a bit humble and [go] outside and [listen]’.

59 Crist (2016), pp. 17–19.

60 Rita Wong and Fred Wah, Beholden: A Poem as Long as the River (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2018), p. 96.

61 Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003), p. 164.

62 Kingsnorth (n.d.).

63 Peter Denton, Technology and Sustainability (Toronto: Rocky Mountain Books, 2014), p. 19.

64 Crist (2016), p. 28.

65 Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘Corn tastes better on the honor system’, Emergence, https://www.emergencemagazine.org/story/corn-tastes-better/.

66 Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo, ‘Hope and mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding ecological grief’, The Conversation (April 4, 2018), https://www.theconversation.com/hope-and-mourning-in-the-anthropocene-understanding-ecological-grief-88630.

67 See Wong and Wah (2018); the authors said the language they used came from the Columbia River itself. This connection enabled Wong’s rising sense of activism— near the end of the poem, she writes that she travelled to Powell’s bookstore to find How to Save a River and Dam Removal (p. 126).

68 Despite Haraway’s statement that ‘We cannot go back ideologically or materially’ (2016, p. 30), there are in fact a number of examples of successful ecological restoration that have already happened, because the places were approached through a changed story: the improved health of Yellowstone’s ecosystem with the return of wolves; the swift return of marine species once ocean reserves are created (see George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (London: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 249); and the restoration of the entire Loess Plateau in China. John D. Liu, who filmed this incredible latter project, has since started up Ecosystem Restoration Camps around the world, noting that the restorative potential of collective, active collaboration with nature is ‘the knowledge that must be understood by all people on the Earth as quickly as possible’ (in Ricardo Tucci, ‘John D. Liu interview: “It is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems”’, Permaculture News (June 29, 2016), https://www.permaculturenews.org/2016/06/29/john-d-liu-interview-possible-rehabilitate-large-scale-damaged-ecosystems).

69 Wendell Berry in Robert Macfarlane, ‘The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape’, The Guardian (February 27, 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape.

70 Mueller makes a similar point, noting humans appeared in the Americas around twelve thousand years ago—‘that is between four and five hundred generations […] The oldest known ancestor of all modern salmon, Easalmo drifwoodensis, lived in the lakes of Western Canada between forty and fifty million years ago […] Because salmon have very different life spans […] you can figure that anywhere between six and twenty-five million generations were born from these rivers and returned to them at the close of their lives’ (2015, pp. 57–58). Plants, of course, go back much further (see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2014), pp. 9–10, 346–347).

71 Wall Kimmerer (2014), p. 345.

72 Kingsnorth (n.d.).

73 Roger Deakin, Waterlog (London: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 262.

74 Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 120.

75 Common Ground, Common Ground, www.commonground.org.uk/what-we-do/

76 The terms biologist Ludwig Carbyn said another scientist used when Carbyn referenced Aldo Leopold (personal communication, December 11, 2018).

77 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1970), p. 279.

78 Ibid., p. 239.

79 Ibid., p. 251.

80 Ibid., p. 262.

81 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett, 1962), p. 95.

82 Ibid., p. 218.

83 Ibid., p. 261.

84 Ibid., p. 243.

85 For example, see Kristine Kowalchuk, ‘Cloverdale Bridge’, Edmonton City as Museum Project (May 26, 2015), https://citymuseumedmonton.ca/2015/05/26/cloverdale-bridge/.

86 TransEd, the multinational consortium undertaking the work, includes Bombardier, EllisDon, and Bechtel. In 2002, Bechtel tried to privatize the water in Cochabamba, Bolivia (including ‘even the rain’ as the Spanish film by this name says) leading to massive protests and the death of a seventeen-year-old boy; they then tried to sue Bolivia for backing out of the contract. Meanwhile, EllisDon has created a public contest soliciting ideas for developing the river valley. As a 2002 New Yorker article stated, ‘The world is running out of fresh water, and the fight to control it has begun’ (see William Finnegan, ‘Leasing the rain’, The New Yorker (April 8, 2002), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/08/leasing-the-rain. TransEd’s contract includes not just the construction but also operation of the line for the next thirty years. TransEd, TransEd LRT Valley Line, https://www.transedlrt.ca/.

87 In Schreiber (2017).

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