KTH will play an important role in the consortium, created under the coordination of professor Pascal Griset of Sorbonne Université and Director of the Institute of Communication Sciences (CNRS).
Nina Wormbs and Miyase Christensen will be a part of this Horizon 2020 project that kicks off now in January. The project consists of 14 research institutes from 11 European member states and will run for 4 years. A project page will soon show up at our homepage, but already now the press release is out:
CNRS hosts the launch meeting of the project InsSciDE -Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe.
The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) will host the launch meeting of the project InsSciDE -Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe- at the National Academy of Medicine (Académie nationale de médecine), on 26th January 2018. InsSciDE is funded through the European Horizon 2020 framework under the coordination of Professor Pascal Griset, Sorbonne Université. KTH is one of the major partners of the consortium created to build the project.
The European Commission has called for the development of effective science diplomacy for Europe. InsSciDE– Inventing a Shared Science Diplomacy for Europe – is a project funded under Europe’s Horizon 2020 framework. KTH will play an important role in the consortium, created under the coordination of professor Pascal Griset of Sorbonne Université and Director of the Institute of Communication Sciences (CNRS). The consortium includes 14 institutes of research or training from across 11 European Member states as well as UNESCO. The 4-year project will engage historians of science and technology, networks of diplomats and scientists, experts of strategy and policy makers to bring science diplomacy into the foreground and better use it. InsSciDE starts with the hypothesis that Europe and Member states possess a great capital of science diplomacy experience – but today this is fragmented, heterogeneous and under-utilized. There is a need to reveal, formalize and communicate this intangible capital, develop its conceptual bases and elaborate tools to help European science diplomacy emerge and blossom. In the next four years, the project will investigate past and present experience, co-construct insights with practitioners, and provide theoretical and strategic frameworks and guidance to support stakeholder awareness and informed policies within the European Union. It will produce knowledge-based discussion material to help prepare practitioners, train some 50 young professionals, and disseminate results over a broad global audience. InsSciDE focuses on several Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 3: Good health, SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy, SDG 13: Climate action SDG 15: Life on Land, SDG 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions and SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals.
The launch meeting will bring together InsSciDE’s relevant stakeholders with its scientific Advisory board members: Catherine Bréchignac, Ambassador of France for Science and lifetime Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, Thierry Courvoisier, President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), Edgar Morin, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the ISCC, and other experts of international renown. Flavia Schlegel, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO, will take the floor. A discussion panel will allow several scientific attachés stationed in Paris to illustrate their current perceptions, experience and expectations.
These individuals will lay the foundation for InsSciDE in front of an audience composed of prominent players in the science diplomacy field (scientists, diplomats and academic specialists).
Considering the current state of global and American affairs re the environment in general and climate in particular, I think we can humbly hope that this special issue has come out when it did to contribute to the debate about mediating and narrating environmental issues through popular communication (from film, music and literature to FB, news and TV). /Miyase Christensen
(2018). Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives. Environmental Communication: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-6.
You better not miss that Environmental Communications recently published an article with big represenation from our Division. Our guest professor and researcher Miyase Christensen is the author of the article together with co-editors Anna Åberg, who defended at the Division in 2013, researcher Susanna Liström who is currently on parental leave in San Diego and researcher Katarina Larsen who among other things is in charge of our Higher Seminars.
The Swedish Climate Policy Council will start its activities in January 2018. The task of the council is to evaluate how the policy of the Swedish government is compatible with the Swedish climate goals. The secretariat will be placed at the research council Formas. (quote from Formas.se)
“No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in targeted direct actions, they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power, because they do not help produce it. They only consume.” (p. 60)
In the end of last semester, our division’s reading group discussed Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization by Roy Scranton, a US veteran with a PhD in English. Certainly, the book is not new, but it was new to us and the jacket reviews—written by public personalities such as Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rob Nixon, and more—along with the short length of the book gave us pause to put it up for discussion and review.
Based on an essay he wrote for the New York Times,the book tells a story of a global environmental catastrophe—attributed to the burning fossil fuels and its effects on the climate system—and the inability of the current political, economic, and social structures to address the impending disaster. In his words, “we’re fucked” (p. 16). The world has gone to shit, and the global capitalist system is “over,” implying that it has outlived its usefulness, and that if humans are to survive the coming storm people must “learn how to die” together (p. 24).
In Iraq, Scranton imagined dying again and again in order to survive; but, in the context of climate change, Scranton argues that it is not enough to come to terms with our own individual death. He says we must learn to die as a civilization. The only way humanity will survive our civilization’s demise will be to “[rework] our collective stores of cultural technology” (p. 23)—which he means, by way of example, classical works of philosophy and literature. Using these canons as our guides, Scranton argues that we must accept human limits and transience, and face our individual fears head on. We must detach ourselves from our carbon-fueled civilization. How to do this effectively, according to Scranton, is to practice philosophical reflection, a performance he equates to an interruption. It is the philosopher-interrupter, such as Socrates, who is equipped to handle the conceptual and existential questions that a global cataclysm presents to us. It is them who contribute to preserve a diverse human heritage that can help free ourselves from the norms of a broken civilization.
Scranton structures his argument as a story. The plot goes something like this: human societies and their recent energy transition to carbon and other fossil fuels have created climate change, a global environmental catastrophe (chapter 1). This transition has led to a tenuous global society, which thinks it can fix climate change but really can’t, because its very existence depends upon burning more fossil fuels and because drastic interventions must happen now. Technological and economic solutions are bound to fail (chapter 2). Political solutions will also falter, not just because a powerful minority controls the “decentralized flows of oil and gas,” making intervention very difficult for the global citizenry, but also because everyone—including our governing structures—depend upon these energy flows (p. 25) (chapter 3). All this builds up to threaten our very existence by which we should respond, not by “vibrating” with or passing on our fears, but by recognizing our own mortality (chapter 4) and engaging in a humanistic “communion with the dead” (p. 92) (chapter 5).
The story is written with flair and style. Scranton has a talent for synthesizing big ideas, giving us stories and reflections from his time serving in Iraq, a swift climatological history of Earth, scientific summaries that clearly indicate a warming environment, an overview of climate activism worldwide, and important lessons that can be drawn from such foundational texts as The Epic of Gilgamesh.
For a room of humanities students, we could appreciate the central argument, the way the story flows, and the inevitable simplifications and omissions that would make the book accessible to the public and carry the message to a wider audience. However, we could not help but find certain simplifications problematic and would have preferred a deeper development of the main argument along with many of the book’s key points.
For example, though Scranton claims that all of us are the problem, much of his argument actually centers on pointing to global capitalism and its most powerful actors as the main culprits. By saying that the enemy is everyone, he negates any possible solutions for interrupting material flows of power that fuel global capitalism, which, in turn, spurs climate change. As also argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books, this contradictory assignment of responsibility—humanity or capitalism—makes it difficult for readers to follow the structure of the argument and therefore to critically assess the solutions he puts forth towards the end of the book.
As a result the book’s final chapters, which seek to develop a path forward out of the crisis, felt unsatisfying. In sum, Scranton wants us to practice philosophy so that we can answer the existential questions that a planetary-wide catastrophe inevitably produces. By practicing philosophy, we can overcome fears about climate change and our attachment to current societal norms. Detaching ourselves from this civilization, we may hope to interrupt our stake in its survival. This interruption, moreover, allows us to continue cultivating our collective humanistic heritage, a necessary condition for surviving the oncoming cataclysm of climate change. This heritage, illustrated with eclectic examples from western canon, buddhist philosophy, etc., remains rather undefined. Logically, the author’s faith in humanity’s heritage is a bit puzzling, since if humans are the culprits, parts of this legacy ought to have been responsible for the development of our current global condition. If, by contrast, Scranton is arguing that the issue rather lies with capitalism, should he be giving more practical considerations as to how to move away from this particular economic system in which we are trapped? But this would not be possible in the context of this book, it seems, since it would contradict the author’s view that people are powerless to change or confront capitalist power.
In the end, the author’s moralistic approach fails to convince. Scranton’s lack of faith in the future of our civilization is summarized in this review’s epigraph. Most of us did not adhere to his argument that our society has become one of pure consumerism having lost all ability to interrupt the flows of power in a concrete, material way. Turning to the conceptual interruptions by immersing oneself (or one civilization) in the classics seems like a self-serving solution which conveniently avoids the hard work of collectively building another world.
But let us stop here. A detailed scholarly critique of the text would be unfair. Rather, the value of this book for an academic audience lies in its ability to entice us to think differently about communicating catastrophe, narrative and storytelling, violence, power relations, and the relevance of humanities scholarship. In that sense, this book offers food for thought without filling you up.
We think this a decent story, albeit one that relies heavily upon the pathos of catastrophe. The historian William Cronon says that “the difference between beginning and end” of a story “gives us our chance to extract a moral from the rhetorical landscape. Our narratives take changes in the land and situate them in stories whose endings become the lessons we wish to draw from those changes” (pp. 1368-1370). Judged as a story, we thought Learning to Die in the Anthropocene was a compelling, thought-provoking read. The narrative sped along, and it wasn’t until the climax and resolution that we felt a disconnect. We perhaps see that philosophy can teach us how to die, giving us the ability to see the world and ourselves in new ways. Yet, we also need the entire range of the humanities—such as history, visual and performing arts, anthropology, literature, politics— to aid not only in this reorientation of vision but also in action. If we accept that humanity is at fault for creating conditions of a major planetary catastrophe, we must admit that some of us are more at fault than others. In that sense, one ought to interrupt to reset power imbalances not just conceptually but also materially. Knowing how to die means that we know when to die, and for some of us, that time has not yet arrived.
1 Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca. Impurity: Two book on the Anthropocene. Los Angeles Review of Books. (Nov. 30, 2015.)
2 Cronon, William. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1347–76.
Complete list of reading group books can be found here!
There is some truth in both positions. Climate change is affecting sea ice levels, and will almost certainly affect traditional bear habitats for the worse. But what contemporary discussions tend to overlook is that polar bear populations were stressed well before climate change became recognized as an issue. The 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, signed by all countries that have polar bear populations, was a specific response to a sense that polar bear numbers were in retreat due to recreational human hunting. All this raises a bigger question. What is it about this animal that makes it so symbolically powerful, and how has this shaped its conservation?
Photo taken from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42322346
From individual trophy hunting to international cooperation
Indigenous Arctic residents have long hunted polar bears. The long-term patterns of this subsistence hunt require a high degree of practical knowledge about polar bears and their ways – knowledge that comes from living in surviving in that same Arctic environment. Sport hunting, which was one of the more divisive questions when negotiating the 1973 Agreement, derives much of its appeal from the idea of conquest, the white person (usually but not always a man) who travels to a distant, exotic, and often inhospitable land and comes home with a trophy to prove his superiority. Much the same was true for those who worked in the Arctic and returned to their southern homes with a bear-skin souvenir.
Individual national governments started to impose their own bans on polar bear hunting from the late 1950s, motivated largely by evidence that populations were in decline. These motivations were later accompanied by a wider sense that the winds of public opinion were blowing green, symbolized by the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The 1973 Agreement did two things. Firstly, it committed its five national signatories to a program of practical action by preventing polar bear hunting with a small number of designated exceptions, and to collecting more data to enable sound management. Secondly, it used the bears as symbols of their of “common will and desire to protect the whole of the Arctic natural environment”, as Norwegian environment minister Tor Halvorsen put it in his opening address to the final negotiating session.
The Agreement proved broadly successful in protecting polar bears from human hunting, and in focusing attention on the ecosystems upon which their survival depended. It did not however lead spill over into larger-scale Arctic environmental cooperation between the five circumpolar states, something Norway in particular desired. In the revision meeting of the parties of the Agreement five years after its ratification in 1981, the Norwegians attempted to enlarge the treaty again. Part of the reason was the political situation in Svalbard. Indeed, Erik Lykke from the Norwegian government delegation confided to a Canadian diplomat during the meeting that his government wanted a multilateral approach to Arctic environmental management because it worried about the USSR isolating Norway in a bilateral agreement over the sensitive Svalbard archipelago.
It was only when Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev made a now-famous speech in Murmansk in 1987, calling for a de-escalation of tensions in the Arctic, that space opened for this larger-scale multilateral environmental cooperation. The concept of “charismatic megafauna” offers one explanation for why even though the Arctic states succeeded in multilaterally protecting the polar bear, it took nearly twenty years to achieve this desired spillover effect.
A polar bear walking across a street in Churchill, Manitoba. The idea that a single bear can provide evidence of something as complex as climate change is being rejected, just as an image of a fat bear would not prove that climate change is a hoax. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press) Photo and caption taken from http://www.rcinet.ca
Charismatic megafauna
The history of the conservation of the polar bear is in many ways a classic example of charismatic megafauna – a term used to described animals whose combination of size, grandeur, and cultural resonance makes them ideal vehicles through which particular values or arguments can be advanced. Cultural resonance is not inherent in the animal: it is a human product that says at least as much about the people for whom the polar bear possesses meaning (and the culture they are part of) as it does about the bear itself. As a recent comment piece in Nature put it, charismatic megafauna are “large, interesting animals that the public — and donors — love.”
In the context of collective Western history with the polar bear, part of the emotional effect of the contemporary Nicklen footage comes from the incongruence of a majestic predator, king of an icy domain, being reduced to an emaciated bag of bones within a landscape defined by human presence (trash and a snowmobile). This is why Nicklen refers to polar bears as “unwitting mascots of climate change”, whose kingdom retreats with the sea ice. The conception of polar bears as vulnerable in turn relies upon a conception of humans as powerful. (This is perhaps why some at the 1981 meeting worried about the effect on public opinion in favor of bear protection if the bears caused too many human fatalities.) In relation to the success factors behind the polar bear treaty, we find it tempting also to wonder whether there is a parallel with the great whales.
The collapse of Antarctic numbers led to the collapse of the Antarctic whaling industry, and ultimately to an international moratorium on commercial hunting that was signed in 1982. In the process whalers have become demonized figures in many (though certainly not all) parts of the world, at the same times as that the whales themselves have ceased to be regarded as floating oil barrels and have even been regarded by some as possessing sentience. Banning whaling has proved much easier than banning the other activities that interfere with their habitats, from waste dumping to sonic pollution. In the same way, banning the commercial hunting of polar bears is far easier than addressing the underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change.
A polar bear watches her cubs on the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. The bay is famous for polar bears, but their population is in decline. Picture and caption from nationalgeographic.com PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM MURPHY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
What should we make of the starving bear?
So what should we make of the starving bear? It’s clearly an image designed to evoke emotion, and there is not necessarily anything wrong with that. Climate change is an important issue that will affect polar bears in general – even if this individual bear might have been suffering from cancer rather than being the victim of retreating sea ice. What is more problematic is trying to draw overarching conclusions on polar bears in particular and the role of humans in the Arctic in general based on a single uncertain albeit charismatic data point. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which had a leading role in the negotiations for the 1973 agreement, is cautious about making its assessment of polar bear populations appear “more reliable than it really is”, despite considerable effort invested in surveying their numbers. This attitude echoes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reluctance to make aggressively specific predictions. That’s not an attitude that seems to have much traction in the current political and cultural moment.
While it can be hard to stomach, never mind witness, animals starve to death all the time for a million different reasons. Picture and caption taken from slate.com Photo: National Geographic
NUCLEARWATERS develops a groundbreaking new approach to studying the history of nuclear energy
A few weeks ago Per Högselius got the good news that he was one of two researcher from KTH to receive an ERC Consolidator grant. His project NUCLEARWATERS will get funding for five years and at least six researcher will get an employment thanks to this. Per and his co-workers will explore nuclear history in a global perspective. If you know Swedish, you can read more about this here: ERC Consolidator Grants till två KTH-forskare | KTH
For those of you that don’t know Swedish, here comes the abstract from the application:
NUCLEARWATERS develops a groundbreaking new approach to studying the history of nuclear energy. Rather than interpreting nuclear energy history as a history of nuclear physics and radiochemistry, it analyses it as a history of water.
The project develops the argument that nuclear energy is in essence a hydraulic form of technology, and that it as such builds on centuries and even millennia of earlier hydraulic engineering efforts worldwide – and, culturally speaking, on earlier “hydraulic civilizations”, from ancient Egypt to the modern Netherlands. I investigate how historical watermanipulating technologies and wet and dry risk conceptions from a deeper past were carried on into the nuclear age. These risk conceptions brought with them a complex set of social and professional practices that displayed considerable inertia and were difficult to change – sometimes paving the way for disaster. Against this background I hypothesize that a water-centred nuclear energy history enables us to resolve a number of the key riddles in nuclear energy history and to grasp the deeper historical logic behind various nuclear disasters and accidents worldwide.
The project is structured along six work packages that problematize the centrality – and dilemma – of water in nuclear energy history from different thematic and geographical angles. These include in-depth studies of the transnational nuclear-hydraulic engineering community, of the Soviet Union’s nuclear waters, of the Rhine Valley as a transnational and heavily nuclearized river basin, of Japan’s atomic coastscapes and of the ecologically and politically fragile Baltic Sea region. The ultimate ambition is to significantly revise nuclear energy history as we know it – with implications not only for the history of technology as an academic field (and its relationship with environmental history), but also for the public debate about nuclear energy’s future in Europe and beyond.
Entitle blog is a collaborative writing effort that looks at the world through the lens of political ecology. For us, Political Ecology is a perspective that seeks to understand who is involved in, and who benefits or loses from, how our environment is produced and reproduced.
It was founded in 2014 by fellows of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) as an outlet to share, reflect on and discuss research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
Toxic Bios is a project at the EHL, lead by Marco Armiero and funded by Seed Box. The project page can be visited here!
Last day at the Divison! We will miss you Giacomo.
On December 1 we said goodbye to our fellow guest researcher Giacomo Bonan who has been working with the EHL on a C.M Lerici visiting scholarship during the fall. Giacomo’s expertise is the Alps, and together with Stefano Morosini (who is a visitor within the same scholarship) he held the brown bag seminar “Mountains and Mountaineering in the Alpine Space between XIX and XX Century – Two Environmental Humanities Case-Studies” in late November this year.
If you are interested in the research Giacomo is doing you can read his publications and follow his profile on Academia.net
This was Giacomo’s second visit at the Divsion, and even though he got a position back in Italy, we certainly hope that he will be back to visit us soon again. Not just because we got to drink wine on the day that he left, but mostly because he has become a dear colleague to many of us.
Among the participants where, other than Miya and Annika, from the Division: researcher and movie maker Jacob von Heland and researcher and Lego expert Peder Roberts.
“Climate change has placed the Arctic into media limelight, with images of environmental change and conflicting interests that play an important role for public perceptions about the region. Media storylines and images also enter discussions about how the region should be governed. To explore this intersection between political decision making and mediation of the Arctic in a rapidly evolving media landscape, a group of international scholars and media practitioners are gathering for a workshop in Stockholm 6-7 December 2017. The aim of this workshop is to start a discussion about the implications of the changing media and political landscape for circumpolar regional governance.”
The event was held in collaboration with Nordiska museet’s program on Man in the Arctic in the Light of Climate Change led by the Hallwyl visiting professor at the Nordic Museum and Stockholm University. It is held at the Nordic museum in Stockholm.
Author
In the end of last semester, our division’s reading group discussed 
A few weeks ago Per Högselius got the good news that he was one of two researcher from KTH to receive an ERC Consolidator grant. His project NUCLEARWATERS will get funding for five years and at least six researcher will get an employment thanks to this. Per and his co-workers will explore nuclear history in a global perspective. If you know Swedish, you can read more about this here: 
