As with many of my Are.na channels, Neogeographia started as a private channel with an invented phrase, to start collecting something for which I didn't yet have a solid name.
But now the name has stuck, and what I'm seeking to capture are "new geographies" or ways we relate to and study the land. In my eyes, this comes intertwined with greater public awareness that "nature," inasmuch as we linguistically separate "natural" and otherwise, is constructed from an anthropocentric point of view. Humans are natural, too, and "wilderness"—well, I'll let Bill Cronon take the wheel:
But now the name has stuck, and what I'm seeking to capture are "new geographies" or ways we relate to and study the land. In my eyes, this comes intertwined with greater public awareness that "nature," inasmuch as we linguistically separate "natural" and otherwise, is constructed from an anthropocentric point of view. Humans are natural, too, and "wilderness"—well, I'll let Bill Cronon take the wheel:
Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.
21st-century environmentalism needs to abandon its romantic upholding of "natural / wilderness" and develop a more holistic view of how humans both fit into and create the world. Inference's review on Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres gets into this:
We are vitally dependent on the earth’s biosphere, yet “the containers and atmospheres that we must allow to surround us can no longer be taken for granted.” We have entered an age in which our “surroundings themselves became, or were recognized as [becoming], constructs.” [...] Sloterdijk has diagnosed the Anthropocene as marking the irrevocable end of what he calls the “backdrop ontology,” the state in which nature is nothing other than “the inoperative scenery behind human operations.” The backdrop is now becoming the foreground, and rapidly becoming a matter of life and death. Immune systems have become central concerns. Making the immune systems explicit means, Sloterdijk writes, in the most important and tragic messages of the book, that human intelligence must break its ancestral habit of trusting to the “backdrop ontology”
And so we find ourselves in another instance of "pariefracture," where we must break our conceptual framing of what nature "is" in order to move forward.
My earlier newsletter on Practicing Geography failed to mention the importance of indigenous land practices (thank you to the friends who pointed this out). Recapping, connecting to landscape can happen through interacting with it on long timelines (recurring visits or lifetimes of proximity), perhaps even geomorphic timescales. In the United States, nobody has a long enough history here to do such except indigenous peoples. It is poetically tragic that the "first American climate refugees" are native, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in the Mississippi Delta.
(I know so little about Indigenous land practices it hurts. I'm going to start with Braiding Sweetgrass and would love any recommendations you may have.)
This is so much going on in this space, that which renders irrelevant the "natural"-"humanmade" dichotomy and celebrates how humans grapple with environmental timescales. Stacy Levy's work often stirs awareness in natural systems, especially hydrologic, connecting us to this timescale. Elise Hunchuck's research, e.g. An Incomplete Atlas of Stones, bridges material cultural history and natural hazards, across centuries. Making The Geologic Now brings together wide topics on anthropocene materiality and geologic record.
We need all the awareness we can get: landscapes of the 21st century, in the anthropocene, under climate change, are going to get weird. This is my first thought. My second thought is, what does "weird" mean? Any landscape is a unique combination of geographic location and effects. I have a lot of conceptual inertia around what defines "natural" or "normal" landscapes to shed.
The town of Minamisanriku, Japan, was hit catastrophically by the 2011 Tōhoku disaster. The rebuilding effort includes putting much of the town on enormous mounds. It's an insanely large-scale earthmoving project, and it is this scale that makes it seem extreme, or unnatural. Are things "natural" only if their scales make sense? (I'm trying to find more information on this—why was this the decision made? what effects will this have on town life? who is paying for it?)
Some of the job opportunities I'm looking at are around habitat restoration, and already in this language we have problems: "re-"storation implies a return to some previous, "natural" state. Many engineers know that returning to some previous condition is romantic, stupid, or ineffective, so there is plenty of work that has different aims. But the language is almost always rooted in the prefix "re-".
The goal is often to assist natural processes (i.e. those that occur without explicit engineering, like precipitation, tectonics, vegetation...). In the case of the Mississippi, this might mean letting river sediments deposit in the Delta, rather than channeling all of the river sediment off the continental shelf. The assumption here is that the process is "balanced"—that the sediment coming down the river may be enough to balance the subsidence we see. This is a big assumption, but it's a starting point. (Nate Kauffman, here at Berkeley, is trying to figure out if this assumption is valid for the SF Bay.)
Whether or not adjustment to 21st century landscapes requires new structures, resettlement, or lifestyle changes for residents (or everyone on earth) are the open questions. We're always hurtling into the future, uncharted. New geography is necessary work to make sense of it all.
Naturally,
Lukas