Eco-Translation

Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene

Michael Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138916845
• eBook ISBN: 9781317423881
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ecology has become a central question governing the survival and sustainability of human societies, cultures and languages. In this timely study, Michael Cronin investigates how the perspective of the Anthropocene, or the effect of humans on the global environment, has profound implications for the way translation is considered in the past, present and future. Starting with a deep history of translation and ranging from food ecology to inter-species translation and green translation technology, this thought-provoking book offers a challenging and ultimately hopeful perspective on how translation can play a vital role in the future survival of the planet.

1 Paying attention

For the fiftieth birthday of The New York Review of Books the well-known British historian Timothy Garton Ash was invited to comment on what he felt had fundamentally changed in the world since the NYRB first appeared on the magazine racks in 1963. Seeing the magazine as a ‘light-house at the centre of the Western world’ he wanted to show ‘how the world has changed under its steady illumination’ (Garton Ash 2013: 51). ‘Human rights’ and a concern with same are first picked out under the sweeping beam of retrospection. He then sheds light on the rise and staggered fall of the US as ‘hyperpower’, the increased prominence of the Arab world, the inexorable ascension of China and the explosion of ‘digital opportunity’, the binary revolution that leaves expression gloriously unbound. Not a word, however, about the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Not a line about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. No melting ice. No rising sea levels. No acidic oceans. No species loss. For Garton Ash, all is gloriously quiet on the weather front. Our duty in this changing world, if we have one, is to ‘remain true to the core values of a modernized Enlightenment liberalism, Western in origin but universal in aspiration’ (53).

The Anthropocene

In thinking about translation in the contemporary moment, my argument will be that the ‘modernized Enlightenment liberalism’ Garton Ash has in mind is no longer effective or persuasive as a means of liberation because of a set of assumptions around what it is to be human which can no longer remain uncontested. We want to begin by sketching out the background to new thinking around the notion of the human and then examine the implications for translation of a move towards what has been dubbed the ‘posthuman’ (Braidotti 2013). Central to our thesis is an idea that has been borrowed from the Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine scientist specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer, namely, the idea of the ‘anthropocene’. Crutzen’s contention is that in the last three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated dramatically. As a result, anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are very likely to significantly affect the climate for millennia to come: ‘It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present […]human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia’ (Crutzen 2002: 23; see also Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17 and Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen and McNeill 2011: 842–867). The Anthropocene is traced back to the latter half of the eighteenth century when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. Since 1750 as a result of human activities, methane (CH₄) emissions have increased by 150 per cent, nitrogen oxide (N₂O) emissions by 63 per cent and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 43 per cent. The concentration of CO₂ rose from 280 parts per million (ppm) on the eve of the industrial revolution to 480 ppm in 2013, the highest level for over three million years (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013: 20). The principal consequence of anthropogenic climate change is that humans have now become capable of affecting all life on the planet. As Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out a number of years ago, when the collective actions of humans fundamentally alter the conditions of life on the planet they move from being biological agents to becoming a geological force in their own right,

For it is no longer a question of man having an interactive relationship with nature. This humans have always had, or at least that is how man has been imagined in a large part of what is generally called the Western tradition. Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in a geological sense

(Chakrabarty 2009: 207)

With this shift in status comes a dual shift in perspective. Firstly, it is no longer possible to speak about the ‘environment’ as something out there, as a negligible and dispensable externality. The environment is not exterior to but constitutive of who we are. Secondly, it is no longer tenable to conceive of humans as a species apart but as one species among many in relationships of increasingly acute interdependency. Therefore, we must think again about what it is to be human and if we think again about what it is to be human then we must inevitably think again about one of the activities that humans engage in, namely, translation.

Joseph Stalin, in a statement of classical historical orthodoxy in his Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), claimed that ‘changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of human society’ (Stalin 1938). Stalin’s distinction between natural history and human history had a certain credibility as long as the human remained, in Fernand Braudel’s words, a ‘prisoner of climate’ rather than a maker of it (cited in Crosby 1995: 1185). In the era of the Anthropocene, however, the distinction no longer holds. Once humans move from being biological agents to geological agents, dominating and determining the survival of many other species on the planet, they then become not so much subject to nature as a condition of nature itself. This dominance comes, of course, at the cost of the very survival of humanity. For this reason, trying to conceive of a sustainable future for humans means the convergence of human history with the history of life on the planet to produce a form of ‘deep history’. Implicit in the notion of deep history is that thinking about a variety of historical phenomena does not involve an excessive privileging of the printed word. Historical evidence can take other forms. Daniel Lord Smail in On Deep History and the Brain points out that the ancient world is unimaginable without archaeological evidence and this also holds for what we now know about the Middle Ages. He adds:

So what does it matter that the evidence for the deep past comes not from written documents but from the other things that teach – from artefacts, fossils, vegetable remains, phonemes, and various forms of modern DNA? Like written documents, all these traces encode information about the past. Like written documents, they resist an easy reading and must be interpreted with care.

(Smail 2008: 6)

One crucial outcome of the emergence of the Anthropocene is a revisiting of traditional disciplinary divisions or alliances. The findings of biology and geology in the nineteenth century and the greatly expanded timescale of terrestrial existence that ensued led to a division of academic tasks. The geologists would concentrate on the physical history of the planet, the biologists would look at the history of organic life on the planet and historians would devote themselves to the study of what a subsection of these organisms, humans, got up to in their time on the planet (Rudwick 2005). With the sole exception of geography, the social and human sciences increasingly defined themselves in isolation from the natural world whether it was social and cultural anthropology under Durkheim differentiating itself from physical anthropology or psychoanalysis under Freud considering any sensation of deep relation to the natural environment as a belated fusional fantasy from early childhood (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013: 49–50). As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz note:

On the one hand, the hard sciences which became too inhuman with their conception of objectivity and their modern certainties; on the other, human and social sciences which became anti-natural by foregrounding as a distinctive feature of humans and human societies the fact of emancipation from natural fate or determination and making society a self-sufficient totality.

(52; their emphasis)¹

Translation studies, traditionally part of the humanities and social sciences, has shared this general indifference to the more-than-human world. Part of the challenge of the advent of the Anthropocene is how to factor thinking about the natural ecosystems on which humans are dependent for their survival into the ways in which we both conceptualise and practise translation. In other words, if translators by dint of their professional activity have often found themselves straddling the ‘two cultures’, moving from a text on farm machinery in the morning to an article on museum history in the afternoon (Cronin 1988: 325–329), the implications of the Anthropocene are much more wide ranging in that it is not simply a question of subject matter or polymath curiosity but of a genuine engagement by translation scholars with a host of disciplines from the earth sciences to animal studies.

The notion of the Anthropocene is not, however, without its problems. In John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, the reader is presented with a picture of largely undifferentiated demographic, economic and technological growth that has predictably baleful ecological consequences. In a work of close on five hundred pages only forty are given over to ‘ideas’ or politics and the rest consist largely of figures, tables and dates (McNeill 2001). The difficulty is that it is not clear for the reader what the specific strategies of the principal agents are in this grand environmental narrative, what choices could have been made differently along the way, who contested what decisions, when and for what reasons? In other words, in the numbers-and-curves stories of environmental change or assessment, the detached, global overview of analysis and assessment results in a relentlessly quantitative, dehistoricised and largely apolitical account of climate change where an undifferentiated humanity becomes the unwitting architect of its own destruction through unrelenting increases in population, GNP, industrial and agricultural output, deforestation and mining.

However, there is nothing inevitable about choices that are environmentally destructive. In 1800, there were indeed 550 steam engines in Europe but there were over 500,000 water mills. Coal was more expensive than hydro power and many industrialists were not persuaded of its added value (Bonneuil and de Jouvancourt 2014: 73). It was the economic recession of 1825–1848 with increasing agitation by textile workers over salaries and conditions and a reluctance by industrialists to invest in public goods (such as dams and other hydraulic facilities) which made the use of coal-powered, steam-driven spinning machines a much more attractive proposition (Malm 2014). More machines meant fewer workers and fewer workers meant fewer demands, notably for wage rises. Therefore, the substantial increase in CO₂ emissions in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, which through economic competition, war and imperial domination would start a worldwide trend, was not the blind outcome of the machinery of ‘progress’ but the cumulative consequence of a set of very specific decisions taken by identifiable socio-economic actors. Similarly, the notion that ecological awareness is only a very recent phenomenon where ‘humanity’ finally woke up to the environmental consequences of its economic activities does not stand up to scrutiny. In the period from the beginnings of the industrial revolution, for example, to the decade when the movement towards fossil fuels use becomes more marked, awareness of the relationships between humans and their environment or the ‘natural world’ was widespread (Guha 2000; Fressoz 2012). Already, in the 1820s, Saint-Simon, a champion of ‘industrialism’ knew what he and his colleagues were doing:

The object of industry is the exploitation of the globe, that is to say, the appropriation of its products to meet human needs, and as, in carrying out this task, it modifies the globe, transforms it, gradually changing its conditions of existence, the result is through industry, humans (outside of themselves in some respect) take part in the successive manifestations of the divinity, and continue in this way the work of creation. From this point of view, industry becomes a cult.²

(Saint-Simon 1830: 219).

More than a century later, William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948) and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948) detailing the environmental consequences of specific human activities sold between 20 and 30 million copies. The notion of an unthinking humanity bringing destruction upon itself does not bear up to examination. Environmental risks have been clearly and repeatedly signalled from the time of the industrial revolution onwards. If biology unites human beings in their shared animality, ecology differentiates them in their ability to produce greater or lesser amounts of anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, in reflecting on the translational consequences of the notion of the Anthropocene it is important not to replace an emphasis on the political space of the nation state with a naive version of the bio-political space of the planet that evacuates historical agency and socio-economic responsibility. We should be mindful of history-earth rather than system-earth. Translation as a global activity in the age of the Anthropocene must be apprehended in the specificity of its impacts in different locations over time rather than in terms of undifferentiated, systemic flows that describe much and explain little.

Post-Anthropocentrism

If history is traditionally associated with the longer view, the biologist Edward O. Wilson in The Future of Life (2003) sees specific, long-range historical thinking as crucial to curbing humanity, as ‘planetary killer, concerned only with its short-term survival’ (202). Wilson argues it is only when humans begin to think of themselves as species that they can begin to take the longer view not only as an important exercise in critical self-understanding but as a means of securing the future. For Rosi Braidotti this move towards species awareness is a necessary step towards post-anthropocentric identity. Critical at the present moment is the de-centring of anthropos, ‘the representative of a hierarchical, hegemonic and generally violent species whose centrality is now challenged by a combination of scientific advances and global economic concerns’ (Braidotti 2013: 65). Of course, the critique of humanism and anthropocentrism is not just a fact of environmental awareness. It is explicit in the tradition of ‘anti-humanism’ that Braidotti references, ‘feminism, de-colonization and anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements’ (16) where the white, sovereign, male subject of Western techno-imperialist thought was singled out for repeated critique. Out of this vision comes a notion of relationality and ontological equality that does not privilege one life form over another.

Louis Borges once grouped animals into three classes: those we watch television with, those we eat and those we are scared of (cited in Braidotti 2013: 68). Another more psychoanalytically inflected way of classifying these relationships might be the oedipal (you and me on the same sofa), the instrumental (you will end up by being eaten) and the fantasmatic (how exotic, sleek, dangerous you are). In Braidotti’s view a post-human ethics implies an end to forms of ‘anthropolatry’ which not only obscure emergent forms of species thinking but consign all other species to dangerous, destructive and ecologically untenable forms of subordination. For her, ‘becoming animal’ is a way of realising the irretrievably embodied, material nature of our existence on a planet that we share with innumerable other species that we continue to destroy in vast numbers. The current rate in the loss of species diversity alone is similar in intensity to the event that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs (World Resources Institute 2005; Shubin 2008: 17–19).

The backdrop to the end of anthropolatry is the rise of geo-centrism, the notion that the planetary must now be figured into all our thinking. This includes everything from the Great Coral Reef and the Gulf Stream to the future of the honey bee. In Braidotti’s interpretation of Spinoza’s monism, she emphasises not so much the tyranny of oneness or the narcissism of separateness that is often associated with monism as the freedom of relationality, ‘[monism] implies the open-ended, inter-relational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interactions with multiple others’ (Braidotti 2013: 89). Being ‘matter-realist’ to use her term is to take seriously our multiple connections to natural and material worlds. If we conceive of the notion of subjectivity to include the non-human then the task for critical thinking is, as Braidotti herself admits, ‘momentous’. This would involve visualising the subject as ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language’ (82).

So where does translation, which on the face of it appears to be a pre-eminently human activity, fit into this notion of the post-human or, more importantly, what does translation studies gain from being situated in a post-anthropocentric perspective? If we bear in mind what Braidotti has to say about new, emergent forms of subjectivity, ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole’, the emphasis is clearly on extended forms of relatedness. Fundamentally, it is a more generous or extended form of relatedness that defines the emergent, post-human moment. Herein lies a paradox for translation as it is frequently understood. On the one hand, translation is seen to be all about relatedness as it brings together people and languages and cultures, crossing the chasms of cultural suspicion and historical aversion. The first principle of the PEN Charter adapted at its congress in Brussels in 1927 on the initiative of John Galsworthy was, ‘Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals’ (Rotondo 2011). The principle, of course, has no currency if there are no translators to put it into effect. On the other hand, translators have been keen to deny relatedness of a kind in their desire to emphasise the value or distinctness of their profession. This denial is part of a much larger conceptual galaxy that needs to be briefly defined if we are to understand how ecologically inflected notions of collaborative translation could prove to be profoundly subversive of dominant ways of thinking about the translation subject.

Dany-Robert Dufour in L’Individu qui vient (2011) locates contemporary understandings of the individual subject in a series of decisive shifts in the powerful stories that the West has been telling itself for centuries (Dufour 2011: 57–83). One of these stories originates in North Africa and is the response of one man, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in modern-day Algeria, to contemporary events. Augustine was greatly troubled by the different factors that had led to the sack of Rome in 410AD. He concluded in his monumental work The City of God that the sack of Rome was, in fact, a playing out of a struggle that would bedevil humanity to the end of time. The conflict between the City of God and the City of Man was based on two c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Earthlings
• 1. Paying attention
• 2. Eating our words
• 3. Translating animals
• 4. The Great Transition
• 5. Language worlds
• Bibliography
• Index