Environmental Institutions: Representing Nature in the Anthropocene

Transcript

The Anthropocene is a proposed name
for our current geologic era,
first suggested in the year 2000 by
atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and
ecologist Eugene Stoermer.
The name argues that human activity
is now the dominant influence on the
Earth's climate and environment
and that that activity will be
present in the Earth's geologic
record millions of years from now.
As a concept, the Anthropocene is
frequently used to sound warnings or
raise awareness, altering
the carbon cycle, creating
fossilized plastics, acidifying
rivers, not to mention warming
the Earth's climate.
These are just a few of the
human-driven changes the proposed
era attempts to highlight.
Though not everyone agrees on the
severity of these changes or even
their existence.
But the Anthropocene need not signal
crisis.
Some science writers see the era as
a call for greater human stewardship
of the Earth's natural resources and
emphasize its species unifying
potential.
Again, though, this proves
controversial as it risks smoothing
over inequalities in the agency and
responsibility that different
individuals have for environmental
degradation.
As the literary critic Rob Nixon
writes, "We may all be in the
Anthropocene, but we're not all in
it in the same way."
On September 26, Pitt's Humanities
Center and the Carnegie Museum of
Natural History co-sponsored a panel
titled Environmental Institutions:
Representing Nature in the
Anthropocene.
The panel featured representatives
from three different kinds of
institutions universities,
museums, and the media.
It was an attempt to see how
different institutions help us
understand our relationship to the
environment and how we might better
work together in the future.
This episode of Being Human will
feature highlights from that
conversation.
Our first speaker was Reid Frazier,
a Pittsburgh radio journalist and
energy reporter for the Allegheny
Front and StateImpact Pennsylvania.
He spoke about the long history of
extracting resources from nature in
southwestern Pennsylvania, the
difficulty of institutional
collaboration, and the complicated
role of journalists at the current
moment.
I mean, I think,
as journalists, we're
just trying to tell people what's
happening in their community
and that specifically
what their government
is-- what their government
is doing or not doing
with respect to these issues.
And, I mean, there's so many-- I
mean, the problem with that
statement is obviously like there's
so many things we could focus on.
How do we decide?
And I can't really-- I don't really
have a great answer.
I mean, there's like sort of
so many fires to put out.
You only have one hose.
But we just try to
sort of hold a mirror up to
society
and explain
what they're seeing.
And hopefully, I mean, that's
the
premise of a free press.
It's important for democracy.
It's like not just important.
It's vital for democracy
for folks to know what
the truth is, and to say
it in plain English,
and to communicate it
plainly to them what's happening.
I mean, there's nothing more plain
than somebody talking to you
on the radio.
And that is
what I see as not
just my modus
operandi, but like pretty much
everybody I work with at
the Allegheny Front and at the
station and elsewhere
in the media, is to tell people
what's happening. And if something's
wrong, to try to find out
and to name the person or
entity who's to blame.
Our next guest was Heather Houser,
associate professor of English at
the University of Texas Austin and
founding organizer of Planet Texas
2050, a cross-university
research project aimed at creating
innovative approaches to
environmental problems in that
state.
Professor Houser argued that
thinking well about the environment
means becoming undisciplined or
thinking outside of preexisting
habits of thought.
And I wanted to start with a couple
quotes that actually struck me that
I read probably in the last
year or so in my teaching.
And to just
reflect on them throughout my
remarks and maybe put them in your
head around this question of how
do we represent nature, especially
across and among institutions.
So the first is from a
Black studies scholar named
Christina Sharpe.
And in her book In The Wake, which
is pretty stunning, and
I would recommend it, it's not
actually about environmental issues.
It's about the afterlives of
slavery.
But she talks about
or makes this call, "We must become
undisciplined." And
then subsequently
reading a very different book from
the Field of Science Studies
by Susan Squier.
And she urges, "It's
brave, indeed, to wander across
disciplines looking for that
undisciplined third space
where one can think strange thoughts
and even make mistakes." And
I found other undisciplined
like Clarion calls out there, too.
So this is an idea that
scholars, writers,
folks in many different walks
of life are thinking about.
And I think it's essential for the
questions that we wanted to talk
about today.
And one of the things I am
thinking about around the
undisciplined is how
can we create new templates
for what even counts as knowledge
when we're trying to address
problems like climate change and
other problems of the Anthropocene.
And so what even counts as
knowledge when we're talking
about these big problems?
So I have an English Ph.D.
I teach in an English department,
but depending on whom I'm talking
to, I'll often say, "Well, I'm in
environmental studies as well."
And I'll get this look like, huh.
Like, she's a square peg who is
trying to fit herself into a round
hole or like she doesn't really know
where she belongs.
Or I'll get these puzzled looks
sometimes, and I think it's
fair enough. I have no problem with
that. It's an opportunity to talk
about what I do.
But to me, it shows that
all of us are deeply disciplined,
even if you're not from an academic
context, whatever it might be like.
Most of our
formal education is about saying
like, "We study this here.
We think about this here.
We do that there.
And never the twain shall
meet." And
when we're dealing with
representing nature and all
of the problems, like Reid gave us
a, I think, great setup
for some of the range of issues
really locally that we're
addressing.
That doesn't work, right?
Like saying, "Well, you think about
that over there and not over here,"
is not going to be very helpful.
She also argued that the potential
to encourage this kind of thinking
was already present in universities.
Those are spaces where the knowledge
of scientific forms
of inquiry can certainly also
have their place.
So it's not as if we have to
abandon, say, the knowledge
you get from ice core samples
or something simply because
we're in the domain of the arts
or humanistic thinking.
Actually, I think that
those third spaces that
I was talking about at the beginning
as being the space
of literature and the arts, where
you can have things like imagination
and empiricism come
together and create new
possibilities and understandings.
And I just wanted to conclude
with this question of
what institutions can do
to foster that kind
of undisciplining or
creating third spaces.
And because institutions
are often the things that solidify
and rigidify disciplines
or create those boxes that tell
you, "Well, you think about this
here, and you don't think about that
there." But at the same time,
a university, a museum,
even like a museum exhibition, it's
this place where a range
of thoughts, a range of
objects, this incredible
diversity of approaches, actually
does live in one
place.
They've often been like segmented
and set apart from each other, but
they actually are in one place.
And so the question-- I mean, I'm
not going to get into all of the
like bureaucratic and
professional reasons.
That's very difficult.
But the fact of the matter
is that they do
house this variety
of knowledges and representations
that you just don't find in so many
other places.
So how can the
potential of that be unleashed?
I'm a part of a project that's
trying to make that happen.
And as you were saying,
collaboration is incredibly
difficult, and
we're confronting the realities of
how hard that is.
But to have the will to give
space to people, to try to
figure that out,
I think universities, museums,
journalistic
media can offer
those spaces if we take advantage
of them.
But then, of course, there are the
limitations on that kind of daring.
And at the University of Texas,
we thought for sure we would not
be selected as one of the so-called
grand challenges to go because
we're
focusing on climate change, and
our university is largely endowed
through lands on which
oil and gas extraction occur.
There's like this fundamental
conflict between the kinds of
work we might want to do
in Planet Texas 2050
and the wealth generation
of the university.
And this is just, I mean, this is an
institutional-- actually, natural
history museums are confronting this
in terms of their funding sources.
So you have the
ideal of these institutions,
and then you have the often economic
and political realities of what's
possible within them.
And sometimes, like where
I am existing in this space of
friction, and we'll see what
is ultimately possible,
but that's like a real consideration
of what
limitations institutions actually
bring to
taking some of these daring steps
to become undisciplined
and approach challenges
like climate change.
Our third guest was Nicole Heller,
curator of the Anthropocene for the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
in Pittsburgh. Dr. Heller spoke
about the importance of seeing
humans as a part of nature rather
than as separate from it.
I'm going to focus in thinking
about the title representing nature
in the Anthropocene.
I really wanted to think a little
about this concept of representing
nature and how
that is changing.
It reminded me of
the book Keywords by Raymond
Williams.
It's Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society from 1976.
And he had in it nature.
In
defining these different words, he
writes, "Nature is perhaps the most
complex word in the language."
And he also writes, "Any
full history of the uses
of nature would be a history
of human thought."
And I was reminded
of this description because
I think it is very emblematic
of what we're talking
about here, the kind of
way that nature or the environment--
environment is
actually not in his 1976
book, which is interesting.
They are really-- it shows how these
are-- it absolutely is an
interdisciplinary or
transdisciplinary term
and that it is socially constructed.
And so I was thinking
about that. I mean, the concept
of nature, really, all of
our institutions,
as individuals, as institutions,
different groups, really, different
disciplines have a stake
in this term.
And it's
a broad concept.
It's a complex concept
in really simple terms.
Nature is kind of the world
all around us.
It's the force of life.
And it's kind of what we wonder at.
Right? And who
are we? How did we get here?
These fundamental
philosophical questions.
So in thinking about this and
engaging with the Anthropocene here
at the museum,
really it's been causing us to
pause and really think about what
is nature, what is natural history,
and reflecting
on the museum's sort
of representation of nature at this
point in time.
And I think one of the things that
I have observed
throughout my career
as a natural scientist,
and in the way that nature's
come to be seen
in a limited sense, is
that it's
kind of like nature.
We've sort of pushed it, and Dan
spoke to this. We've pushed it to
kind of a too narrow
definition or too narrow, where
really it's the domain for natural
scientists.
It's a domain for environmental
scientists. And you have people in
the humanities, people in these
other fields don't really have a
stake in this terrain.
It's also seen as elitist.
Nature is something
only certain elites have
the time to worry about
or think about.
And I mean, that definitely reflects
this part of the idea
that nature
is that which is separate from
humans.
It's the countryside.
It's somewhere else, somewhere far
away. It's not manmade.
For Dr. Heller, museums occupy a
space between journalism and
universities and have the potential
to move people towards new
understandings of their relationship
with nature.
And so thinking about this
institution of the museum, just
to wrap up,
at the museum we do sit in
a-- it's a very interesting place.
I'm pretty new to museums
myself, but
it does feel like this hybrid
kind of institution
somewhere between
the academy and between
journalism. It's very focused on
public communication.
And our job really, in a sense,
I think, is, as a natural
history museum, to represent
this new, broader nature.
This new, broader natural history
that really
represent that with
and for people and
help people to make sense of
these complex issues.
I think that we
have a real opportunity to help
engage people in this kind
of civic engagement with these
issues.
The museum is sort of special
in a sense in that
people come here voluntarily, which
is interesting, and it's
possibly a limitation. I'm
not sure. But it means that the way
that we present information really
has to be people have to want to
come, and they want to have to spend
their time here and even pay to
spend their time here.
It's multi-generational.
So it's another-- it's a really
interesting way that learning is
happening across generations.
And then
the museum as an
institution, from what we
understand, is
seen as a trusted resource
in the community.
And so that credibility
that we have, we have to really
continue to
work with people and
kind of
hold ourselves to the highest
caliber to continue
to maintain that trust.
But I think that trust is also one
of the things that
emboldens us to feel that we
do need to talk about these issues
and help
the museum to be a space where
people can come, and they can talk,
and they can feel safe to have hard
conversations.
And they can ask questions
from the mundane
or from the local.
What's happening with the
cracker plant to
what's happening with climate change
all the way to what does it mean to
be a human being
on the planet
at this moment in time?
One idea that came up multiple times
in the conversation has to do with
shifting discussions about nature
from focusing on conservation to
focusing on justice or equality.
Reid Frazier, for example, suggested
looking beneath Pittsburgh's
accolades as the most livable city.
Well, I mean, I think you
bring up an interesting point that a
lot of people in Pittsburgh have
been sort of talking about
over the last few years, is this
idea that we're
the "most livable city." The
most livable for who?
And that's a great point
to bring up.
Because what I think what it's
suggesting is that these
sort of laurels that Pittsburgh
has gained in sort of a
national perspective are
papering over historic inequality
in Pittsburgh and sort
of segregation
along racial and class lines
and inequality
in school systems here.
So I think that is a
very, very valid point.
But I also think two things
can be true at once.
Like there can also--
I mean, it is good to have not
just the Frick Environmental Center
but other green buildings.
I mean, I think those
pilot projects are designed
to
experiment and see
if there's better ways to build
buildings, to use
fewer resources, because
as probably
100% of you in
this room understand, we're
baking the planet.
We're running out of resources.
We need to live
much more efficiently as a
species if we don't want this
cataclysmic
six feet of sea level rise,
ten degree difference by the end of
the century kind of climate
change to happen as is
possible.
So, yeah.
The
whole livable city thing.
I mean, I grew up
here, so when Pittsburgh was first
voted Most Livable City, everybody
was like, "Wait a second,
Pittsburgh's not the worst place on
the earth? I thought it was the
worst place on earth."
But I think like it's 2018.
It's not 1985 anymore.
So I think that's gotten--
I think we can move past that as a
city. I think we're ready,
and I hope that our city leaders
will
do that.
Professor Houser suggested that
asking questions about justice
allows space for the arts and
humanities to play a role in the
conversation.
I also wanted to
think about this question that Reid
brought up around justice,
and which also came in through Dan's
remarks from Rob Nixon about
this is a time of convergence
and also a time of divergence.
I also,
in my position as
someone who champions the humanities
and the arts, I
think that those are places where we
get to think about some of these
fundamental concepts and
what are some of the entrenched
meanings they have for different
groups of people.
So when you say justice
to maybe some of the people on
the slides or in my context,
we're looking at varied populations
in Texas. So maybe
have a Latino community
in the Rio Grande Valley.
You have rural ranchers
in West Texas. You have
young urbanites in Dallas.
What even the idea
of environmental justice might
mean to these different people
varies greatly.
And so, how can things
like literature, film,
how can those be a space where we
play out what those different
meanings have been and could
possibly be in the future?
There was also a recognition of the
limits of working through
institutions, such as when Professor
Houser talked about supporting
alternative energies at the
University of Texas.
This actually it gets to the heart
of the institutional question
because one of the things we're
trying to figure out is our
relationship, our planet, Texas
2050 relationship to this
existing institutional
entity at U.T., which is the Energy
Institute, which has traditionally
taken up those questions.
But from, well,
how do I-- I don't know, but
much more from the industry
perspective and not from the
perspective of addressing something
like climate change and population
growth, which is not to say they're
all like pro-fracking or
pro-extractivism,
but just it's been much more of an
industry perspective rather than
like we are a state facing a
crisis for these reasons.
What can we change or do
for the future perspective?
So we're still trying to figure out
like energy.
We decided we had really
four big pillars we wanted to
address, which are urbanization,
energy, water,
and public
health, basically.
And these all tie into each
other. But we just wanted to make
sure those were big focuses of the
project over the around
eight years we will exist,
so we sort of bit off
the easier fruit.
Is that right?
That sounded all wrong.
What is that like, low-hanging
fruit? I'm mixing all my metaphors.
I'm the worst at proverbial
expressions. It's kind of funny.
Yeah, we definitely a bit off more
than we can chew.
But the first thing was the
low-hanging fruit, and
that was water because the
energy. And
yeah, we have to figure out that
collaboration.
But what's so interesting is the
other thing that Texas is so good
with is wind.
And you probably
know more about this than me, but
it's a huge wind generator,
and it has a huge wind generation
potential,
and that does get
stymied.
And even though there are similar
rationales and
typically conservative values that
might make that
an increasingly viable and
attractive energy form,
you just get the industry pushback.
So that's certainly something that
we want to discover
and like how can you tap into
values people have and
sort of orient them maybe
toward-- and this is language.
I actually shouldn't have said
it that way because this language
and even gestures of coercion
and making people do things is what
we're trying to avoid.
But yeah, it's hard.
It's just like we have this
potential.
It hooks into these values.
What is actually getting in
the way of that is something we want
to understand.
But the panelists agreed that it was
impossible to achieve their
environmental goals without engaging
and listening to their public.
For Dr. Heller, the museum needs to
be clear about their messages
without shying away from difficult
conversations.
Yes, it's a great
question. And I'm pretty new here,
so I'll preface that.
So I can speak for what do I
think?
But also reflecting the
conversations that we have,
other staff, and
the motivation we have to take on
the Anthropocene is really that
motivation that we feel
that we, as an
institution, we have an obligation
to speak more clearly to
these issues that there are
connections between
the
natural history that we share
in our halls, the deep time
perspective, the geology.
And if you go through geology, you
go through deep time in dinosaurs,
you learn about extinction in the
ancient past,
that deep time is incredibly
relevant for understanding these
issues that we face
and that we have an obligation to
connect that information
to these very real
issues that people are facing in
their lives. And so I think
one way we can help
facilitate this dialogue is to be
talking about it in clear terms,
like you say,
in not shying away from
these topics and in
making those connections for people,
helping people connect the dots more
between
the information that's out there
about the history of Earth
with the things that they're hearing
about in reading about in the news.
But they don't really necessarily
have the ability
to understand them.
So how can we serve sort of
in that boundary role of helping
people
connect the dots and understand that
when they leave here, they might
say, "Oh, now I understand that
story that I
heard on the Allegheny front." That
that would be--
That's really what I was getting
it.
It must be really hard because you
can't just like, say, go
to the Hall of Gems and be like,
"But look over here.
Look at what all these gems have
done." There's that coal
elevator that has been there since
I was a kid.
So it must be
hard, not just like from a physical
perspective of building
a new climate change wing on the
museum, but just--
I don't know. As an institution,
there's probably hurdles.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, and one of the things
that I've been interested to notice
when coming in is it's like, well,
we got to change that. That's
ancient, right?
And people say, "No, no.
Don't touch that.
It was like that when I was a kid--
Don't touch that dragonfly.
don't ever change it." And so
right. It's historic.
And so I think that is one of the
things that we're really realizing
that's kind
of our challenge
here at this museum. And what we
want to do is how do we
not get rid of the history but
use the history
and make those connect.
Kind of use the history, but also
update it and make the connections
and kind of continuously
look back and forward.
And
I don't know of another museum
that's really done that.
And so we really are
trying to figure out our own
pathway here and
respect to this historical
institution, but use that.
I talk a lot about the-- people
say, "Oh, you're collecting.
You're curator of the Anthropocene.
What are you collecting?" And
I haven't exactly figured that out,
but there's
so many things.
But I like to think of the museum
itself as the object because
it's this object that has
been collected.
If the Anthropocene started in
1945,
which is what geological
scientists are
proposing with the great
acceleration with atomic bomb
testing,
then that means the Carnegie
Museums have been collecting across
this transition from a previous
epic, the Holocene, to
this current epic.
So it's an incredible
sort of window into this period of
time that is
so important
in our planet's history.
Professor Houser concluded by
pointing out how important it is for
universities to move beyond their
traditional role as providers of
expertize.
Well, one of the-- in my particular
institution,
I think one of the things is making
people, researchers, listen,
which I'm not saying that's how I
typically-- that's not necessarily
one of my methodologies.
So we produce, we describe,
we measure, we conceptualize,
and that's all really important.
But I think one of the things that
it's important to do at a moment,
this moment, is to do
all that work and then to also
listen. Because one of the
disconnects that I think is
happening, as you were saying like
scientists are describing and
describing and describing.
And even if you listen to
well-intentioned climate
reporting, you get the sense--
maybe not when a hurricane is
like hitting us in
a moment.
But most other times, you
hear a lot of reporting or ways of
talking about climate change that
makes it seem elsewhere or at
another time.
And the research,
I feel like if we listen to what
people are experiencing
and bring the research that
we're doing to bear,
like make that more interactive,
we cannot make it seem like this
is something that's going to happen
or is happening somewhere else.
One of the myriads
of challenges is making
climate change feel actually
occurring.
Because until that happens for
everyone-- because it is actually
occurring for everyone,
and just the way it gets talked
about is like it's actually
occurring over here.
And certainly, it is maybe more than
over there, but until it's felt
is actually occurring,
it'll be very hard to
get anything done on
a time scale that it needs to get
done.
And I think a big part of that
actually occurringness is, okay, how
are people experiencing whatever
they might be calling it.
They might not be calling it climate
change. And
bring those narratives and
the research we do
together somehow.
So I think that's one
approach that some
are taking, and that could be
more fruitful than we produce
knowledge and then put it out there.
But yeah, that's one thought.
That's it for this episode of Being
Human.
This episode was produced by Noah
Livingston, Humanities Media Fellow
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned next time for a special
interview with Kazuo Hara,
documentary filmmaker and winner of
the first biennial University of
Pittsburgh, Japan Documentary Award.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
Environmental Institutions: Representing Nature in the Anthropocene
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Frazier, Reid (interviewee)
Heller, Nicole (interviewee)
Houser, Heather (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
October 5, 2018
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0035
Description
Highlights from a panel conversation on September 26 titled "Environmental Institutions: Representing Nature in the Anthropocene." The panel featured Reid Frazier (Energy Reporter, The Allegheny Front and State Impact Pennsylvania), Nicole Heller (Curator of the Anthropocene, Carnegie Museum of Natural History), and Heather Houser (Associate Professor of English, University of Texas-Austin). It was hosted by Dan Kubis (Associate Director, University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center). Reid, Heather, and Nicole were representing three different kinds of institutions: universities, museums, and the media. These institutions help us understand our relationship with the environment and define possibilities moving forward. But do they see these realities and possibilities in the same way? How might they work together to better formulate our current environmental realities or motivate future action? What can other institutions or perspectives add to the conversation? Our guests worked towards answering these questions as they shared their experiences working with environmental issues and the communities they affect.
Extent
32 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Environmental sciences--Social aspects
Universities and colleges--Social aspects
Natural history museums--Social aspects
Mass media--Social aspects
Nature--Social aspects
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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Environmental Institutions: Representing Nature in the Anthropocene

In collections