Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation

Bruce Braun, Bruce Willems-Braun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317211259
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Biological Sciences

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation brings together leading scholars to explore how we might know, enact, and struggle for, the conjoined social and ecological transformations we need to achieve just and sustainable futures. The question of transformation, and how it might be achieved, is explored across a variety of topics and geographical sites, and through heterodox analytical and theoretical approaches, in a collective effort to move beyond a form of critique that hands down judgements, to one that brings new ideas and new possibilities to life. Chapters are lively and original engagements with concrete situations that sparkle with creativity. Together, they add up to an impressive study of how to live, and what to struggle for, in the complex socioecological landscapes of the Anthropocene. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation—An Introduction

Bruce Braun

Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota

Action cannot be delayed because time does not flow from the present to the future—as if we had to choose between scenarios, hoping for the best—but as if time flowed from what is coming (“l’avenir” as we say in French to differentiate it from “le future”) to the present. Which is another way to consider the times in which we should live as “apocalyptic.” Not in the sense of the catastrophic (although it might be that also), but in the sense of the revelation of things that are coming toward us.

—Latour (2013, 12)

Paul Klee’s famous painting Angelus Novus (1920) has over the years been subject to numerous interpretations, perhaps most famously by Benjamin ([1940] 1968) in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Walter Benjamin’s reading, the “Angel of History” faces the past and is propelled into a future to which its back is turned, caught up in a storm of progress that piles wreckage upon wreckage at the angel’s feet. Although the angel would like to make the past whole, the violence of the storm renders him powerless to do so. More recently, Bruno Latour (2013) has provided a different reading: It is precisely our modern tendency to face backward while continuously attempting to flee the horror and destruction of the past, he suggests, that renders us unable to see or to face the looming catastrophe that we have inadvertently allowed to pile up behind our backs. It is only now, with the advent of the Anthropocene, that have we begun to see the full horror not of the past but of the shape of things to come.¹

According to Latour’s provocative reading, we have entered a period in which our experience of time has changed. If in modernism time was seen to flow from the present to the future, today we increasingly experience time coming toward us, from the future to the present. Across a diverse interdisciplinary literature we find two related themes: (1) that socioecological transformations are coming, although the form and shape of what is to come is not easily predicted; and (2) that socioecological changes are also necessary, if we are to avoid the catastrophic futures that appear to be coming toward us. The language of “planetary boundaries” and “tipping points” has become commonplace, as has the recognition that it is human activity—or the activities of certain humans—that threatens to push earth systems into unpredictable and potentially turbulent states. Without social, political, and economic change, the future of our species and many others is seen to be at risk.

For geographers this presents a host of new challenges. Although a robust critical literature has done much to help us understand how we have arrived at this juncture and has highlighted the deeply uneven geographies of socioecological change, it has been far less successful at imagining and engendering just and sustainable alternatives to existing political, economic, and ecological practices. In part, this reflects a particular critical stance that remains wedded to a linear conception of time, namely, that by understanding the past we might be able to anticipate and shape the future. Certainly the past still matters when we face the future (see Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, this issue), but in the Anthropocene the shape of things to come is increasingly seen to be nonanalogous with what existed in the past (indeed, this assumption informs many political technologies of security, from preparedness planning to resilience). We might also locate the discipline’s inability to imagine alternatives in its widespread and principled rejection of prescriptive or normative approaches to political or ecological change and its widely held suspicion of utopian thought. Whether these stances remain viable today is a matter for debate.

The theme for this special issue (“Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation”) strongly reflects the current historical juncture and emerged from discussion with members of the Annals editorial board during the summer of 2012. It was proposed to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) publications committee in fall of that year and in the following months, 220 scholars or teams of scholars submitted abstracts that were read, evaluated, and ranked by reviewers drawn from the journal’s editorial board. Thirty-one contributors were invited to submit full manuscripts for review by referees, from which the twenty articles appearing in this issue were selected. Many more promising abstracts were submitted than could be accepted, an encouraging sign that the discipline, and nature–society studies more generally, has begun to pivot toward the future and to consider how socioecological transformation might be imagined, anticipated, or enacted.

Thematic relevance and a clear contribution to geographical scholarship were emphasized in the selection process, but authors were not constrained by genre or style. The result is articles ranging from traditional case studies to more experimental forms like manifestos. Due to tight word limits, trade-offs between empirical detail and conceptual or theoretical development were often necessary, adding further to the diversity of the articles included. But although the special issue is topically diverse, it is less geographically diverse than we had hoped. The vast majority of abstracts were submitted by institutionally situated scholars in North America, Europe, or Australia and often focused on sites in those regions. Regrettably, several invited submissions that focused on other regions failed to materialize. In part this geographical distribution reflects global disparities that demand our continued attention, both in terms of where and by whom academic scholarship is produced and disseminated but also in terms of where socioecological innovation is seen to be occurring and which regions have the resources to anticipate and adapt to future changes. One need look no further than the frenzied activity of architects, planners, artists, and city officials busily designing experimental buildings, infrastructures, and environments in New York City, which during the Bloomberg era was increasingly promoted as a laboratory for resilient urbanism (Wakefield and Braun 2014). This does not mean that communities in the Global South are less resourceful or less creative. Indeed, in the face of looming ecological change, many important social and political innovations are emerging there and diffusing widely. This will likely accelerate in coming years as cities in the Global South become the global cities of the future. Yet with a few notable exceptions like the innovative transportation systems developed in the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Medellín, these experiments often proceed with far fewer resources, are less grandiose in scale and flashy in style, and struggle to gain the attention of global media and North American or European scholars. Further, with the shift of focus in climate change scholarship from global mitigation to local adaptation, researchers have often turned to those communities in which they are institutionally situated. There is much that is salutary in the publicly engaged and participatory research that has resulted, but in the aggregate it runs the risk of narrowing the geographical focus of research. At the very least, the uneven representation of world regions in this issue suggests the need to reflect more broadly on the geography of scholarship in the Anthropocene, as well as where we locate or seek important socioecological changes.

Although the articles in the issue are diverse, they nevertheless address a number of common themes. Many of the articles are concerned with marginalized populations, issues of social and environmental justice, and the question of who is empowered and authorized to imagine and define socioecological futures. For Derickson and MacKinnon, these are critical questions in the context of historically marginalized black communities in Atlanta and take us to the heart of how and by whom climate justice is defined and struggled for. For Cameron, Mearns, and McGrath, the imagination of climate futures in Nunavut must grapple with the practice and politics of translation, as notions of resilience, adaptation, and climate change can have very different meanings in English and Inuktitut. To not attend to these differences in the context of a broader global shift from mitigation toward adaptation risks blindly—or perhaps deliberately—perpetuating a colonial present. Likewise, Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, in their hard-hitting yet hopeful “A Manifesto for Abundant Futures,” argue that “postnatural” environmentalism cannot simply turn its back on the past in the name of composing socioecological futures but must also reckon with the “ruins” of existing colonial and capitalist relations, confront onto-epistemological difference, and recognize the autonomy of nonhuman others. Although in the Anthropocene time might come toward us from the future, each of these articles insists that the past continues to haunt the present and that ignoring this leaves us poorly equipped to address crucial social differences in how we face the future.

Other articles take up questions that are at once epistemological and political. Increasingly we inhabit a world in which models and scenarios generate policy and inform politics, nowhere better illustrated than in the multiple reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With every model and scenario, and with every socioecological proposal that takes wing from them, pressing questions arise about what counts as expertise and how and by whom knowledge is constructed, stabilized, trusted, or contested. Although the “climategate” affair is now seen as an unwarranted attack on climate change scientists by climate change deniers, there is a growing interest in the diversity of ways that socioecological change is known and experienced. In her contribution, Lave charts the changing landscape of scientific expertise in and beyond the university and asks searching questions about how, where, and by whom knowledge is likely to be generated in coming years. For their part, Rice, Burke, and Heynen consider the role of experiential knowledge in how Appalachian residents respond to climate change, and Fincher, Barnett, and Graham contrast different understandings of time and temporality between Australian climate scientists and state planners on the one hand and residents of several ocean-side communities who have incommensurate understandings of temporality on the other. What emerges in these and other articles is a growing recognition of multiple ways of knowing socioecological change and the need to navigate among them.

Perhaps one of the most notable developments in recent years has been the growing importance of literature, film, and art for how individuals and groups figure, imagine, or anticipate what is to come. Indeed, as future scenarios have taken greater significance in public life, the line separating science from fiction has become increasingly blurred, reflected in the emerging genre of “cli-fi,” the proliferation of apocalyptic novels and film, and the reemergence and redeployment of utopian and dystopian fiction. For Strauss, the recent works of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood and American writer Barbara Kingsolver open opportunities for exploring political imaginaries of climate change, blending utopian and dystopian imaginations of socioecological transformation while developing explicitly feminist themes. For Ginn, the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse takes us to the very limits of human life and reveals an underplayed political dimension to apocalyptic visions insofar as they force viewers to feel the conditions of the Anthropocene. Kallis and March, on the other hand, mobilize the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin to provide critical perspective on the growing “degrowth” movement, and Hawkins and her coauthors explore how art projects provoke new ways of understanding environmental change. Although the intertwining of aesthetics and politics has often been viewed with suspicion, each of these articles takes up in different ways Yusoff’s (2010) suggestion that in the face of climate change aesthetics can function as a valuable space “that configures the realm of what is possible” in any politics.

One of the appeals of art and aesthetics in the Anthropocene is that they are seen to open much needed space for creativity and experimentation and to work on an affective and emotional level often seen as lacking in the more technocratic language of policy and planning. This is consistent with the wider turn to experimentation and invention in recent nature–society scholarship and the view that experimentation is necessary to engender new forms of knowing and dwelling in and with human and nonhuman others (see, e.g., Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010; Whatmore 2013; Lorimer and Driessen 2014). Experimentation here is understood less in terms of the hypothesis testing of positivist science than in terms of the staging of encounters through which new possibilities for politics might emerge along with new political subjectivities. The conceit here is that by working with materials and material others we can potentially open ourselves to events that surprise and disturb, allowing the world to force thought (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1996; Stengers 2005). Understood thus, the turn to experimentation is often attached to a decidedly optimistic politics that stands in contrast to gloomy prognostications of catastrophic climate change and earth systems pushed past tipping points. Contributors to this special issue advance our understanding of the relation between experimentation and socioecological transformation across a wide range of sites and practices. Gardening projects in struggling schools are examined for their ability to disrupt standardized educational practices and present opportunities to deepen relationality and solidarity in spaces of education (Moore et al.), agroecological and architectural experiments are explored for their ability to reawaken a sense of wonder and an ethic of care (Buck), and experimental backcasting methods are explored as a means by which future environmental goals can be brought forward into the present to inform how households are managed (Davies and Doyle). Other articles identify novel sites and practices that might provide key resources for socioecological transformation. Approaching household practices somewhat differently than Davies and Doyle, Australian geographers Gibson, Head, and Carr investigate everyday household sustainability practices as the potential bases for survival skills that might be needed to endure catastrophic change. Others locate political and ecological alternatives in sites and practices as diverse as biomimicry (Johnson and Goldstein), peasant movements in Chile (Aguayo and Latta), and even financial markets (Castree and Christophers), with the latter arguing that finance capital might provide important pragmatic means to switch credit money into green infrastructures.

Throughout virtually all of the articles, we find the recognition that with the advent of the Anthropocene the separation of nature and society, and the human and nonhuman, is no longer tenable, if it ever was. This recognition does not mean that humans fully control earth processes, although for some so-called eco-pragmatists such control is deemed both possible and desirable (i.e., Brand 2010). Nor should we too quickly assume symmetry between human actions and earth processes, because despite the immense impact of human activity, we remain subject to, rather than the authors of, many large-scale events (Clark 2010). Challenging nature–society dualisms, though, means that environmentalism today faces the challenge of reimagining environmental politics after nature, a position that has gained traction among mainstream environmental nongovernmental organizations like the Breakthrough Institute and the Nature Conservancy, as well as environmental geographers and historians (i.e., Cronon 1995; Braun 2002). Whereas Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg trace the convergence of postnatural environmentalism and neoliberal environmental governance, Mansfield and colleagues derive a somewhat different lesson from the same developments; namely, that today, environmentalism focused on external nature must be seen as only one of many competing environmentalisms organized around different socioecological projects. For Mansfield and her coauthors, socioecological futures will be shaped through struggles not over what is natural but over what natures are to be produced, by whom, and for whose benefit. For their part, Wainwright and Mann suggest the need to return to notions of natural history that include humanity, such as found in the writings of Karl Marx, as part of the dual task of challenging existing and emerging forms of planetary management and engendering a climate politics today that can create a just and livable planet in the future.

For Wainwright and Mann, the urgency of their intervention is heightened by the character of contemporary political life in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, which they argue prevents rather than encourages the radical responses required by climate change. This concern is articulated most forcefully by Swyngedouw (2007), who argues that the proliferation of carefully managed means of participation in political institutions and processes is symptomatic of the absence of the political, insofar as the political is defined by the recognition of and antagonism between radically different political demands. Swyngedouw’s claim that much environmental management today is “postpolitical” has generated considerable debate and is taken up by numerous authors in this issue. Holifield and Schuelke, for example, turn to science studies, pragmatist philosophy, and aesthetics to trace the political trajectories of environmental matters of concern in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In doing so, they suggest that the political cannot be reduced only to those exceptional moments in which prevailing orders are disrupted by egalitarian challenges but must include the diverse processes by which knowledge is produced, desires constituted, and claims made. Derickson and MacKinnon and Wainwright and Mann also seek to extend, contest, or complicate Swyngedouw’s thesis, whereas other articles, like those of Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg and Cameron, Mearns, and McGrath, can be seen to bring into view precisely what Swyngedouw thinks is missing: the recognition of, and struggle for, radically different possible socioecological futures. Noting this might be an appropriate way to close this introduction, not only because the dangers of technocratic management and its democratic deficits are very real but also because in the pages of this issue there are significant and meaningful disagreements about how the antagonisms that constitute “the political” in the Anthropocene should be understood, and from where, by whom, and in what ways transformations toward a just and livable planet should be generated. We invite you to read this special issue with this sense of disagreement in mind, with the hope that the convergences, tensions, and gaps in the issue are themselves productive of new directions for thought, practice, and politics in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1.   Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation—An Introduction
• 2.   The Future of Environmental Expertise
• 3.   Knowing Climate Change, Embodying Climate Praxis: Experiential Knowledge in Southern Appalachia
• 4.   Temporalities in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise
• 5.   Translating Climate Change: Adaptation, Resilience, and Climate Politics in Nunavut, Canada
• 6.   Environmental Politics After Nature: Conflicting Socioecological Futures
• 7.   The Place and Time of the Political in Urban Political Ecology: Contested Imaginations of a River’s Future
• 8.   Toward an Interim Politics of Resourcefulness for the Anthropocene
• 9.   Climate Change and the Adaptation of the Political
• 10.   A Manifesto for Abundant Futures
• 11.   The Art of Socioecological Transformation
• 12.   These Overheating Worlds
• 13.   When Horses Won’t Eat: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene
• 14.   Imaginaries of Hope: The Utopianism of Degrowth
• 15.   On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene
• 16.   Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix
• 17.   Biomimetic Futures: Life, Death, and the Enclosure of a More-Than-Human Intellect
• 18.   Agro-Ecology and Food Sovereignty Movements in Chile: Sociospatial Practices for Alternative Peasant Futures
• 19.   School Gardens as Sites for Forging Progressive Socioecological Futures
• 20.   From Incremental Change to Radical Disjuncture: Rethinking Everyday Household Sustainability Practices as Survival Skills
• 21.   Transforming Household Consumption: From Backcasting to HomeLabs Experiments
• Index