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Owain Jones: “It’s the end of the world as we know it – and I feel ….fine!?!” (REM)

Notes on attending Immortality and Infinitude in the Anthropocene conference Stockholm

 I am lucky enough to be able to attend very interesting conferences in the UK and Northern Europe (previously North America but now I feel that is a ‘step’ too far). I value,  and to some extent at least, enjoy, these events. But I have got a bit of a nagging doubt about them, and/or an ill-formed question. Because I work in the area of geography – the study of the earth and nature-society relations is what these conferences,  (or strands in larger conferences), are generally about.

Now,  to cut to the chase,  I think we are living through a deeply tragic period in the earth’s history. The ecological crisis  – the 6th great extinction  – Anthropocene / Capitalocene / Obsceneocene. These are the true Dark Ages: the wholesale destruction of life – as ecological biodiversity –  within the only known complex biosphere IN THE UNIVERSE.

thylacine

This is tragic for modern people too. Depression, obesity, diabetes, the horrendous stats on the UK’s collective health, and the spiralling of free health care costs, are testament to this.

So I have a “great” job – but I do spend a lot of time feeling very angry, upset, panicky. I think about being part of this tragedy every day (and maybe every hour of every day). I find personal happiness, (and successfully living with family), friends very hard reconcile. I feel isolated and unsocial; I turn to drinking; job satisfaction is a contradiction in terms.

Now, at the conferences there are often really good papers on one or other aspect of the crisis. This was certainly the case at the Stockholm event. For example, there was a truly astounding thing about plastic in the sea and chemical pollution (Life and Death in the Plastisphere, Heather Davis,  Pennsylvania State University, USA).  Put at its starkest, we might be sterilising the world – sterilising ourselves, through certain compounds passing through bodies, into the environment, attaching themselves to plastic micro-particles which are then ingested by organisms. OMG.

In most conferences / sessions I have been to, emotions of grief/loss/anger are not that on show. One notable and clear exception though: ‘For the Love of Nature?’ Centre for Human Ecology Conference, 24-28 June 1999, Findhorn, Scotland.  But more often than not, this is just not the case.

At the Immortality and Infinitude in the Anthropocene  there was another great talk (Endlings, endings, and new beginnings; D. Jørgensen, Umeå University, Sweden) using extracts from the cutesy film ‘The Last Unicorn‘ to bookend discussions on species extinction. The substantive focus was on Swedish beavers, and their re-introduction into environments, but also on the extinction of the Marsupial wolf (thylacine).

2_Last Unicorn vs Red Bull

At the end of the talk there was a collective peal of laughter, as the last lines of “The Last Unicorn” were played. This could reflect the good vibe we had in the room at the time  – and more generally during the whole conference in Stockholm. But it puzzled me a bit. My overriding response to stories like these is mourning: loss of species, loss of individuals – loss of individual and species umwelt  – the suffering of individuals as they were hunted – the loneliness suffered by the last of their kind. I was not laughing. At all.

Laughter, I think partly, is due to people communicating with likeminded peers; conferences are a release from pressures of teaching; an opportunity to share ideas in a rarefied atmosphere;  and so on. To travel around to such conferences is a sign of professional / personal success – to be enjoyed.

But I come back to this suspicion, or question, being one of the aspects of a paper I wrote in 2008; What is the relationship between theory and world / life here? Of course no sharp line can really be drawn between these two,  but, in essence, or to put it crudely,  are we using theory to work on the world – and thus confront the world? (which is a very messy, challenging and upsetting process) –  or are we using the world to write theory (A safer, happier, career type process)??

There were a number of great talks on mourning and melancholia in the face of the “Obsceneocene”. They were delivered with great verve and palpable satisfaction to speakers and audience. This is not an intended ‘attack’ on speakers of the conference Immortality and Infinitude in the Anthropocene. It is – just what I said at the start – a nagging doubt – an ill-formed question.

/Owain Jones

Jol Thomson: The Wrong Journey and Fugitive Values

 

Image from Hitchcocks ‘The Wrong Man’
Image from Hitchcocks ‘The Wrong Man’

In the immediacy of the necessity to revalue all values, of course how we travel and the speed at which it supposedly needs to take place, is one band of the multi-spectral issues of ideological oppression and species infantilization that is commanded over us from the plutocracy and its minions. Can we also speak about our hypocrisy in a world unjustifiably at war, radically inequal, superficial, passive/obedient, conformist and the complacency with which, as Noam Chomsky has often noted, the intellectuals so often serve the interests of power?

Ideal New York Times newspaper by the YESMEN
Ideal New York Times newspaper by the YESMEN

Is there a trade-off between engagement and emission? Doubtful but perhaps arguable. We love travelling, we need it for perspective, to engage in difference, to perceive the “water in the fishbowl”. The symbolic ushering in of the renaissance, the climbing of Mont Ventoux by Petrarch – the opening up of the landscape – was of course climbed by foot and hand, without the burning or expropriation of fuels. Today even the energy (with extremely contentious origins) by which we travel, itself travels long inefficient distances, sometimes with return tickets. 

"Global Gas trade both LNG and Pipeline" by Crossswords - Jol Thomson. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“Global Gas trade both LNG and Pipeline” by Crossswords – Jol Thomson. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Is there a way to avoid the emissions and still operate on a global or post-national level? And if there were, would this not remain a specific privilege of an elite class? Is the GENI program, influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s ‘World-game’ worth promoting? What about ballooning as suggested by artist Tomás Saraceno as an alternative travel system?

Water_cycle

The difficult to face or even comprehend level of hypocrisy in the 21st century is fundamental, and I find myself included in that category – and these are the concerns I face daily – it is inescapable if you live in a modern, tyrranical western society. We remain in a state of what Mark Fischer in his book “Capitalist Realism” refers to as interpassivity and depressive ahedonia (which overcoming would be a major break for socially and environmentally engaged, for Life to actually flourish and progress).

master_visual

If meetings of minds, collegial or otherwise,became more like a pilgrimage where the very act of getting there – slowly – the possibilities and encounters, the differences, could be enveloped within the very topic of the conference itself – discussed and confronted – perhaps we would learn-by-doing and find better approaches to arrival or journey or expedition or being-together. Processes.

Perhaps we could relieve or erode some of the psychological stresses inhibiting us by actually changing our modes, methods and behaviours – overcome the traumas that contribute to our actual situations, thereby interpellating a clearing, a path, a possibility. . .

quote-the-intellectual-tradition-is-one-of-servility-to-power-and-if-i-didn-t-betray-it-i-d-be-ashamed-noam-chomsky-36572

/Jol Thomson

Libby Robin: Seasoned travels

 

 

Are we already seeing climate change in action? I pondered on this question earlier in May when in Canberra the street trees carried both blossom and autumn leaves. Very strange to see – the leaves of last year and the promise of spring together on the same boughs, on the same tree.

I have had a long interest in desert Australia and its ‘aseasonal’ year. Sometimes the rain comes in winter. Sometimes in summer. Sometimes not at all. And only after rain do we get ecological activity in most of the desert. Understanding seasons in Australia was a reason for doing our book Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country.

In the prologue to How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), I argue for the seasonal exceptionalism of Australia. It starts with a ‘parable’, a story of the inland bird, the Banded Stilt, which defied understanding because it did not breed ‘seasonally’ as expected. I suggest that we need new ways of thinking about Australia’s place in the world:

The Banded Stilt’s world challenges all fiscal models built around yearly cycles. The global economy is annual, implicitly catering for seasonal agriculture and industry. The world’s fiscal cycles follow the ‘annual’ harvests. It is easier to make an international treaty that protects migratory birds on regular seasonal flights along international ‘flyways’ than to manage lands within a single nation for unpredictable, non-annual seasons. The Banded Stilt’s eye view casts light on some of the problems of finding a place for Australia in a global world.

But maybe this is not just an Australian problem.

It was no surprise to me to find European trees behaving badly – with both blossom and autumn leaves in Australia’s shifting seasonal conditions. This is a European tree in an Australian environment, and the mismatch is evident. Botanist Tim Entwistle has recently written a book advocating the need for Sprinter and Sprummer – seasons between seasons. Aboriginal people have had very different ways of looking at seasons for very long times, and have different calendars in different parts of the country. Seasonal differences matter even more when your life depends on finding food in this country.

Photo: Johan Gärdebo
Photo: Johan Gärdebo

But now I have been challenged again. Here I am at the campus of KTH and I am seeing the same thing – hedges and trees – European natives in Europe are covered in spring growth in the first week of December. Just near the office here is a hedge with both autumn leaves and spring shoots. The avenue of trimmed trees also has just a few leaves from autumn and new buds all over the trees. The tree outside S:t Jakobs Church near the Kungsträdgården in central Stockholm is covered in buds. Just nearby, the skating rink – now full of Christmas skaters – is surrounded by trees that have new pale or even green shoots. These trees are not responding to sliding seasons: they have skipped winter altogether and think it is April. This is unlikely to be a good evolutionary strategy. It is a waste of ecological energy if the first hard frost kills all the shoots. The question is, how many times can these trees shoot in vain? Will they die if they try too often?

Photo: Libby Robin
Photo: Libby Robin

Is this an urban heat island effect? Are we seeing the first climate changed ecosystems of Stockholm? All these questions arise in the face of a small observation.

I have been travelling between the seasons of Australia and Sweden for the past 4 years. It has been a great privilege. Watching nature closely has been one way for me to feel really ‘here’ when I come. Time zones, seasonal shifts and the exhaustion of long-haul travel all make time in Sweden ‘other-worldly’ – but perhaps now we are really seeing another world, both in Sweden and Australia.

Libby Robin

David Nilsson: Long train running (reflections on quality)  

It is a grey and very early November morning. My neighbourhood is empty at this time of the day and I am briskly walking towards the subway station accompanied only by the chilling wind. Realising that I am going to be travelling for 36 hours, I ask myself solemnly; why am I doing this? Why on Earth am I travelling by train from Stockholm to Darmstadt in Germany, a destination that neighbours Frankfurt hosting the arguably largest airport in Europe?  I think the main reason is just to show to myself that it can be done. But also to explore if there are certain other qualities to this kind of travelling, qualities that we generally overlook as we jet around the world looking for answers to global sustainability challenges.

Photo: David Nilsson
Photo: David Nilsson

Once we had begun talking at KTH about sustainability and travelling habits in our own scientific community, I felt it was impossible to entirely ignore the issue. Having just flown back from a conference in Kenya on the theme of sustainable transport [sic] I promised myself to try a more environmentally friendly alternative for my upcoming trip to Darmstadt. Even if it was just for a one-day guest appearance in a lecture and a seminar, at least this time going by train was possible, if not practical. In the following, let me share some reflections from the trip in the context of “The Travelling Scientist”.

First, just making the reservation was a bit difficult. Our travel agency of course helped out, but compared to the plethora of alternatives for flying, the railways did not offer many options. Faced with relatively poor interconnections between the three countries’ state-owned operators, to be on site on Monday morning I had to start already on Saturday. And spend the night somewhere on the way. However, going back was easier, with a series of connections over 18 hours.

Secondly, the environmentally friendly alternative turned out to be more expensive, as usual. The train tickets alone cost me about €400, compared to around €300 for taking the plane. Add to this the extra costs of hotel nights, and food and drinks for two and a half days of travel in total.

Photo: David NilssonPhoto: David Nilsson

So; on the downside I can just conclude that the train took me there and back in an awful long time and at a considerably high cost. Not exactly the wet dream for an advertising campaign. But were there any “hidden qualities” to it? Yes, actually.

Since I anyway had to stay the night in Copenhagen, I spent an afternoon mulling through some archives at Landsarkivet (District Archives) in Lund. I had intended to go here for quite some time but never really felt it worthwhile to go just for the sake of this alone.

Moreover, I seldom find a lot of time to work undisturbed and in a concentrated manner during my regular working week. But two days comfortably seated in a train in the sole company of a laptop can actually be quite productive. Especially since all trains nowadays seem to be equipped with A/C outlets, and some also with free WiFi.

Photo: David NilssonPhoto: David Nilsson

Even when I wasn’t working on my laptop, or reading some of the literature I was carrying, I had the opportunity to reflect and think or just let my mind wander. And how rare isn’t that for the contemporary professional and scientist?

Of course I also enjoyed the shifting impressions of people, landscape and culture as I rolled through Sweden, Denmark and Germany. For once, when travelling, I could even experience the changes of the local cuisine and not just the stereotypic airplane food that leaves absolutely no impression other than that ordinary faded reminiscence of taste, with added plastic feeling. As a bonus, I got to buy a dirt cheap crate of Danish beer when the train, to my great surprise, boarded the ferry to Rödby on the way back!

Photo: David Nilsson
Photo: David Nilsson

I’m not sure that when adding this all up, the train stands out as such an impossible alternative after all. Just the fact that I forced myself to think and act in a different way opened up new opportunities, and added other qualities, to the “simple” act of transporting myself to Germany and back for a day’s work. If our job as scientists is mainly aimed at maximizing the throughput in terms of quantity, in number of conferences attended or guest lectures held, then flying is of course the way to go. But if quality in the long run is at the core, I’d like to wait passing a final judgment.

David Nilsson: Why the science community needs to talk about travelling

“Are you expected to always ride a bicycle just because you’re working with environmental issues?” asked my colleague over his morning cup of coffee. A recent conversation with another colleague had left him slightly uncomfortable; was it inappropriate for him to use a motorbike for commuting instead of the more environmentally friendly bicycle? “But I’m not very fond of biking…” he lamented, wistfully sipping his coffee. “Well, biking is good” another colleague broke in, “but aren’t our conference trips a bigger polluter anyway?”

What started as a small coffee table conversation triggered a wider debate at our division at KTH. Many of us focus our research on global sustainability and development. Climate change and the unsustainable cultures of ‘the anthropocene’ increasingly attract our attention, especially with the launch of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in 2012. We have extensive collaboration with other universities and crisscross the globe partaking in conferences, seminars, exhibitions, lecture series and so on. Being genuinely concerned with setting humanity on a more sustainable path, we wish to secure a long healthy life of planet Earth and its co-travellers in space.  But in doing so, are we not at the same time making the problems worse? We all know that travelling by aircraft technology emits a lot of greenhouse gases. Moreover, flying symbolises the modern unsustainable lifestyle that we say needs to change. Is there incoherence in our reasoning? Is that even a problem? These questions slowly started nagging us.

engine_view
Photo: Johan Gärdebo

 But first we needed to find out how much we travel and what emissions it leads to. With some help from the travel agency and the central environmental management function, KTH Sustainability, we looked into our travelling for 2013. To get figures specifically for our division we had to retrieve data from the KTH travel database and enter each trip manually into an emission calculator. The calculator chosen, from International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), is the standard calculator used by the United Nations, KTH and many flight carriers.

In 2013 we had made 56 international flights, corresponding to a direct emission of 25 tonnes of CO2. Some calculators also include the Radiative Forcing Index (RFI) to capture the warming effect due to other long-lived greenhouse gases. Using the RFI emission calculator from Atmosfair (a carbon offset scheme) generated the total emission of 64 tonnes of CO2 equivalents. But RFI has been considered an uncertain measure of the effect from aviation and should be used with care.

But is this a lot, or just a little? What does 25 – or 64 – tonnes of greenhouse gases mean anyway? To put this in perspective we can look at per capita figures. According to the latest IPCC report the global emissions in 2010 stood at an average of 7 tonnes CO2 equivalents per capita. The emissions are unevenly distributed across the globe. The average for OECD countries is 15 tonnes per cap/year while Africa and Asia countries contribute around 5 tonnes per person. The average GHG emission for Sweden was just over 6 tonnes per capita in 2012. Our travelling at the division equals between 1 and 2 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per employee, which in this perspective cannot be seen as insignificant. Furthermore, IPCC fifth Assessment Report tells us that keeping global warming below 2 degrees most likely requires a reduction to something like 2 tonnes per capita by the year 2100. Clearly, coming generations of scientists will have to find other ways of transporting themselves and their knowledge. These are the facts. But what are the implications and what can be done about it?

train_approach
Train approaching. Photo: David Nilsson

The climate science community – and other communities dealing with global sustainability –faces a serious dilemma, potentially affecting our ability to take a lead in sustainable transformation. However, I believe that the incentives and logics built into our work and academic life propagates against a drastic reduction of our international travelling in the short term. But we need to look into our options. Maybe we can set targets to reduce our emissions through Carbon Budgeting. Maybe we can take the train more often. Maybe we should look for more effective ICT solutions for our international collaboration, or plan and structure our collaboration differently. In any case, we need to start talking.

And that’s what The Travelling Scientist is about. Please join us!