Tag: 21. Century

Leaving Planet Terror

The movie by  Robert Rodriguez from 2007 is definitely not a climate narrative. Rather “Planet Terror“, a true retro flick, picks up a theme popular in the 1970s: anihilation through some mysterious chemical experiment gone havoc. Still I found the closing images worth sharing here, as they are not only quite impressive visually, but also because they combine narratives and traditions that are important for coastal climate adaptation.

Set in the US state of Texas the story eventually culminates in a biblical exodus of the last survivors from the barren land called USA to the promised land – called Mexico.

One of the central characters, a Latino in the US himself, gives the crucial advice: “You’ll be able to defend yourselves with the ocean in the back.”

This direction of the exodus is of course a critical comment and reversal of the image of the USA as a promised land for Mexican migrants. But the movie also references the ocean shore in particular as a mythical place of refuge. This might seem like an odd concept, considering that living by the sea actually is living with the proverbial “back against the wall”. But it resonates with the attraction coastal living holds in our culture. This has not always been the case – quite to the contrary. There is historical argument that coastal settlements at least in the Global South are a colonial heritage.

Rodriguez’ garden of Eden combines an ocean idyll with reference to ancient Inka civilisations and a military base, as can be seen in the image above. Obviously these things don’t really match. It’s a very ambivalent and complex collage, very dreamlike and thus inspiring us to think about the relationship between human civilization, destruction and violence and the natural environment as our habitat.

Retreat to the Metaverse?

The other night a friend told me about the island state Tuvalu creating a second version of itself online. The story had escaped me and when I heard it from him, it sounded reasonable enough. Having read about managed retreat and communities seeking drastic measures to adapt to climate change so much lately, it seemed like just another, if somewhat desperate, attempt in adaptation. After all, a time of massive transformation challenges is also a time for imposters, megalomaniacs and alot of human hybris.

Instead, the beautifully done and cleverly minimalist website www.tuvalu.tv is a very poetic critique of these kind of techno-topias. And it is a striking example of a digital mourning site, a very sad and moving yet also sharp commentary on failure and loss. The upload queue is really heartbraking: everything we are, all the culture, all the memories, the customs, the sites and rituals, all uploaded one by one, as if it was just cargo on some ship. Not even a proper ark!

If more nation states had ministries of justice like Tuvalu does, who seem to actually understand something about the value of belonging and identity, and that are able to speak so eloquently about it, we wouldn’t be in he mess we’re in. We urgently have to integrate sentiments of loss, belonging and identity in climate politics, not to instrumentalize or exploit them, but to do justice to what essentially makes humans humans. Otherwise, we will be saving lives but loosing ourselves.

Thanks to Rainer Schweigkoffer for the lead!

Time and Tide Bells

Since 2008 artist and bell-maker Marcus Vergette has been developing the multi-site installation series Time and Tide Bells in various coastal spots across the UK. The installations consist of two bells, one upside down on top of the other, set up in tidal zones so that the waves ring the lower bell during high tide. The work references the many legends of sunken cities of which the church bells can allegedly be heard ringing on the coast on certain sundays. (see also the post here)

In 2010 the project installed also a bell in London. Meanwhile there are seven other “Time and Tide Bells”installed across the island. You can check for the locations here.

The first Bell on the coast of Devon, South England.

All images are from the project’s website.

FloodZone – an ongoing visual research of life in the tidal zone

FloodZone is an ongoing photographic series by Anastasia Samoylova, responding to the environmental changes in coastal cities of South Florida. The project began in Miami in 2016, when Samoylova moved to the area and experience living in a tropical environment for the first time.
The works display in an impressive way the ambivalences and the fluid frontiers between city and sea in a community exposed to frequent floodings. I am particularly impressed how artist Samoylova expands the topic and visual themes onto popular imagery and the everyday in the urban scenery.

All images are from the artist’s website.

Thanks to Ulrike Heine for the lead!

“For now, perhaps more than ever before, the past is relevant to the future.”

In the introduction to his book “Worlds in Shadow” from 2022 Australian Geographer Patrick Nunn writes:

“The stories from Haida Gwaii and Aboriginal Australia neatly illustrate the three main sources of information from which we can today discover details about once-inhabited, now-underwater lands: science, memory and myth. Each can be complementary, meaning that when they are read correctly they may yield information that is unique. But, of course, if we are biased, even subconsciously, and demean or dismiss things like memory and myth because we do not know how to interrogate them, then we are likely to end up with an incomplete picture of the past. The purpose of this book is to try to rectify the situation, to demonstrate that each of these three information sources is potentially valid, something that gives a roundness to the past, a multidimensionality to history that personalises it and makes it more relevant to us today.

For now, perhaps more than ever before, the past is relevant to the future. In a world where we are confronted by global change that is as contemptuous of human endeavour and individual aspiration as it is dismissive of political borders and agendas, understanding how our ancestors were affected by comparable changes and how they overcame these is at once a lesson in coping as well as a beacon of hope.”

The woman in the fur coat who brought the flood

Australian Geographer Patrick Nunn opens a book of his with the following story told by a Chief of the Haida people of Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte Islands).

“Young recalled, his people lived in northwest Haida Gwaii in a large village across from Frederick Island. One day, a group of children playing on the beach noticed a stranger some distance away, wearing a fur cape of a kind never before seen in Haida lands. Running up to her, one cheeky boy lifted the cape to expose the stranger’s back, the sight of which made the children laugh and jeer.

After the adults called their children away, the woman went to sit alone on the sand near the ocean’s edge. The water rose to her feet, so she got up and moved a little distance up the beach. The water again reached her feet and so it went on until the ocean had climbed higher than ever before. It became clear to the Haida that their homes would shortly be flooded, so in panic they tied logs together to make rafts and, taking to the ocean, were able to save themselves.

Young explained that because these crude rafts could not be steered, each drifted to a different place, a story that could be a distant memory of the time — thousands of years ago — when the first Haida peoples are known to have been dispersed by the rising of the ocean level here.”

Patrick Nunn goes on to conclude: “Young’s story can be read as myth, especially the detail about the stranger and the unfamiliar fur cape she wore. […] But ist is also science, a distant echo of ancient people’s explanations of what happenend to them […] 12.700 years ago.”

Patrick Nunn stresses the point that stories llike these must have been passed on orally for around 500 generations, an astonishing cultural achievement that defys the notion of oral culture as short-lived or deficiant. See also this article by Nunn for aeon.co magazine here.

Flooded Buddha

UNESCO World Heritage site in Ayutthaya (Thailand) province – inundated with floodwaters on October 10, 2011. More than 250 Thais have died after two months of heavy rainfall have inundated large swathes of the country and hit provinces on the northern outskirts of the capital particularly hard. AFP PHOTO / Pornchai KITTIWONGSAKUL (Photo credit should read PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP via Getty Images)

Solastalgia

 

In his book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019), Glenn Albrecht elaborated the term ‘solastalgia’. A portmanteau coinage, embracing ‘nostalgia’ (longing for the past) and composed of the Greek term algos (pain) and Latin solacium (solace), solastalgia alludes to the feeling of being homesick while you are at home. If you have never lived in a house threatened by rising waters, think of how, upon arrival at a pleasant destination when travelling, you can be instantly overwhelmed by homesickness for precisely that place, because you know your stay will be of short duration. The medical journal The Lancet has already referenced ‘solastalgia’ as a useful concept to assess the effect of climate change on mental health. (Quoted from an article by Thijs Weststeijn)

Comparable terms in other languages might be: saudade, banzo, dor [Portuguese], hireath, cwtch [Welsh], momo no aware, wabi sabi [Japanese], ma [Chinese], Sehnsucht [German], tizita [Ehtiopian], añoranza [Spanish], morriña [Galician], regrette [French], also from English : melancholia, sadness, grief, blues, longing, absence, pining, yearning…

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Lecture by US journalist Jeff Goodell on his book “The Water Will Come” with alot of examples and images around rising sea level and sinking cities. From 2019.

I find this to be one of the really useful and smart talks on the topic, very straight forward and without the usual vanity antics. I have taken the liberty of writing down Goodell’s bullet points that he uses to structure his talk:

Five truths about Sea Level Rise:

1. Storms and hurricanes are like roulette. Sea Level Rise is like gravity.

2. The water will come – the question only is how fast and how high.

3. Trouble begins long before a city becomes the new Atlantis (Opportunities too – I want to add!)

4. Billions of Dollars will be spent on adaptation and protection. A lot of it will not be well spent.

5. Opportunity often comes disguised as catastrophe.

In the end he also gives some very short and helpful advice, what needs to be done: “Remember, this is not an alien invasion.” “Make risk transparent for everyone.” And finally: “Retreat is not a dirty word.”

The case for culture

In a very nice, comprehensive and extensive article, Dutch author Thijs Weststeijn, describes the role of culture in forming a climate conscience. The article not only describes the threats to cultural heritage the world over, particularly flooding, and the efforts to save it, but he also makes a case for using cultural heritage to create awareness and ultimately climate action. Here are two short quotes:

“Perhaps an awareness that the building blocks of one’s own civilisation are under threat might mobilise new groups, for whom the disappearing of coral reefs, say, remains too abstract or remote. Behavioural scientists point out that, when confronted with overwhelming amounts of scientific data, such as that continuously produced by climatologists, people actually become less likely to take action (see Kari Norgaard’s book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, 2011). Instead, people have to be affected on a deep emotional, psychological and spiritual level, which suggests that the layered sensations we experience in encounters with heritage – historical connection, aesthetic appreciation, and solastalgia – might motivate people in new ways.”

“A focus on cultural heritage also offers new perspectives on human agency in the face of the climate crisis. This heritage has, after all, been made by humans and so by human hands we should be able to save it. Besides, historic heritage, while transcending the lifespan of one or more human generations, is less intractable to us than the ‘deep time’ associated with the evolution and extinction of coral reefs and other endangered creatures.”

Weststeijn also sketches future scenarios for cities and cultural sites in the following excerpt:

“One can imagine the partially flooded centres of Venice, Hoi An or Miami becoming particularly attractive tourist destinations for the duration of their disappearing (in a state of ‘dark euphoria’ described by the futurist Bruce Sterling in 2009), before turning into a diver’s paradise. And perhaps from the perspective of ‘deep time’ the man-made polder landscape was never a feasible project to begin with, and Dutch hydrologists might eventually, with a sigh of relief, surrender their lands back to the sea. Such visions are not necessarily long-term scenarios since, now, even the possibility of handing our heritage to the next generation appears impossible.”