Patterns of Environment-making: the Arctic and its Global Contexts
The present situation of the world as we know it is undergoing processes of radical change that have had and continue to have disastrous consequences for ecosystems and planetary life. Entwined in a history of capitalism, colonialism and industrialisation, humanity is facing the effects of climate change with rising sea levels, draught, flood and wildfires, alongside deforestation, the loss and toxification of nature and the mass extinction of animal populations. In the Arctic, environmental change is happening fast. For Arctic Indigenous communities, the warming of air and sea temperatures and resulting reduction of land and sea ice, fish and other marine species are disappearing, as are the habitat of mammals such as polar bears, seals and walruses. This in turn affects the food supply and social and cultural fabric of the Indigenous communities that rely on these animals for sustenance.[1] Similarly, on the Arctic tundra climate instability in winter cause food insecurity for the reindeer, which, alongside increased pressure from predators, reduces the herds. This again has become a threat to the Indigenous reindeer herders’ livelihood and cultural existence.[2]
Alongside the rapid climate change we are witnessing in the Arctic, various nations (Canada, USA, China, Russia, and the Nordic countries) stake a claim to the region to secure ‘their’ share in its natural resources (including Arctic fauna, oil and metals) – frequently to develop so-called green solutions and clean energy (such as windmill parks and copper mines). This move to appropriate inhabited and living lands to harness the work of nature in projects of development building economic wealth and geopolitical power continues the centuries-long modus operandi of capitalism, colonialism and globalisation that has conditioned large-scale human-initiated environmental change and fuels the current climate crisis.[3]
The foundation of human-initiated environmental change was laid with the rise of European capitalism in the fifteenth century, which commenced a capitalist world ecology and what Jason W. Moore terms the Age of Capital, or Capitalocene.[4] Although ‘Europe’ and the ‘West’ did not exist as a geohistorical force or geocultural formation until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from 1450 the European ‘seats of imperial power and centers of financial might’ began large-scale, capitalist systems of environment-making that both enabled and ‘accelerated environmental transformations beyond anything known before’.[5]
Understood as a system of controlling environments that bundles economic and social relations with and within nature, capitalism made possible a radical remaking of nature and human relations to nature and work.[6] Alongside capitalism’s new forms of production that exploited and materially changed large tracts of nature and its webs of life, a new ideology developed that justified these intrusions. Through filters of power-inequality relating to class, race, nation, gender and sexuality, capitalism invented and operated on a separation between humanity and nature. This Humanity/Nature divide was created and enacted by the ruling class, who saw themselves as members of Humanity and unquestionably separate from Nature. At the same time, they designated other people and other life forms as Nature.[7] Capitalism’s Human/Nature divide allowed nature, animals and humans to become ‘cheap Nature’: an entity external to and abstracted from Humanity and valued only in terms of its potential to produce and accumulate capital (through unpaid labour and extraction of human, animal and natural resources) as cheaply as possible.[8] Through capitalism, Nature came to represent ‘all those forms of life and labor that provided useful work, but were culturally and juridically excluded from the cash nexus’ – and could consequently be put to work cost-free.[9] Because capitalist systems of production exhausted the life-making capacities of these appropriated relationships and forms of labor, they harbored an inherent need for continuous expansion only colonial ventures could satisfy.
As evident in the history of European colonialism, capitalism’s inscription of Nature, allowed the utilisation of Indigenous and African peoples, women, animals and natural entities as unvalued reproductive labour. Central to this development was the advent of European Transatlantic slavery and colonisation around 1450, which commenced a landscape transformation (including deforestation and large-scale monocrop plantation systems) unprecedented in speed, scale and scope.[10] European Transatlantic slavery and colonisation further allowed a total devaluation and commodification of human and other forms of life, including the social relationships that maintained the system and constituted the very conditions of life.[11]
Appreciating both the world-historical, capitalist contexts of environmental change in the Arctic and the region’s own patch-work colonial history, ‘Patterns of Environment-making: the Arctic and its Global contexts’ invites papers and discussions on histories of colonialism and Arctic environmental change.[12] Through a postcolonial, ecofeminist and world-historical framework, the creative and scholarly research presented and discussed during the workshop contributes knowledge on how to better understand and interpret the current situation of climate change in the Arctic and its environmental, cultural and social effects. Drawing on the theory and concept of the Capitalocene, the workshop presents papers that centre on one or more of the three following areas:
1) the intellectual, political and practical ways in which dominant society historically contributed to the climate crisis, through the creation of ‘cheap nature’ and radical transformations of social worlds and human relations to other humans, animals and the environment.
2) historical instances of Arctic Indigenous responses and resistances to Western colonialism and capitalist world-systems and attendant ideologies of progress and modernity, on what grounds these resistances occurred and the alternatives they offered.
3) historical and contemporary Indigenous voices and aesthetic expressions that present alternative perspectives, worldviews, knowledges and experiences of human-nature relations in the Arctic.
‘Patterns of Environment-making’ builds and disseminates critical research on the historic and continuous causes and conditions of climate and other environmental changes in the Arctic. The workshop engages with current debates in discourse on the Anthropocene by presenting novel humanities scholarship nuancing and challenging the most historically simplistic and universalising explanations of anthropogenic climate change.[13] Identifying and bringing out historic and ongoing Indigenous resistance towards, and alternatives to, the colonial and capitalist world system’s exploitation and appropriation of humans, animals and nature, the workshop further demonstrates the ongoing relevance and need to take Indigenous perspectives seriously and involve local communities in political debates and decision making concerning environmental change and sustainable development in the Arctic.
Notes
[1] See for example Anne Birgitte Gotfredsen, Martin Appelt and Kirsten Hastrup. 2018. ‘Walrus history around the North Water: Human–animal Relations in a Long-term Perspective’, Ambio, 47 (Suppl 2), 193–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-1027-x
[2] Hege F. Andreassen, ‘Regn og is truer reindriften’, Magasinet Klima, 07.02.2023, https://cicero.oslo.no/no/artikler/regn-og-is-truer-reindriften; The International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, https://reindeerherding.org/about-us (accessed 13 October 2023).
[3] Jason W. Moore. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Verso Books; 2023. ‘Our Capitalogenic World: Climate Crises, Class Politics, and the Civilizing Project’, Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis Studia Poetica (11): 97-122; John Antonacci. 2021. ‘Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene: Militarized Ecologies of Accumulation in the Long Sixteenth Century’, Journal of World-systems Research (21/2): 439-467; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene – The Earth, History and Us. Trans by David Fernbach. Verso; Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge; Carol Merchant. 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper Collins Publishers.
[4] Moore builds his definition of Capitalocene on uses and explanations of the term presented separately by Andreas Malm, David Ruccio and Donna Haraway. Moore, ‘Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, 2016, 5.
[5] Jason W. Moore. 2016. ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, in Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, (78-115), 98; Moore, ‘Our Capitalogenic World’, 98.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Merchant, The Death of Nature, chapters 7-9; Moore, ‘Our Capitalogenic World’, 99-100)
[8] Moore, ‘Our Capitalogenic World’, 102-104.
[9] Ibid, 105.
[10] Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, 96-97, 105-107; Moore, ‘Our Capitalogenic World’, 102-104.
[11] Ibid. Donna Haraway. 2016. ‘Staying with the Trouble Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, (34-76), 51.
[12] For scholarship on the Arctic as colonised space see e.g. Høvik, Ingeborg and Sigfrid Kjeldaas, 2023a. «Introduction: Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone», in special issue Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone: Part One, edited by Ingeborg Høvik and Sigfrid Kjeldaas, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial studies (25/7): 865-877; Huggan 2016, Huggan, Graham, 2016. «Introduction: Unscrambling the Arctic», in Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North, edited by Graham Huggan and Lars Jensen, Springer, 1-29; Johan Höglund and Linda A. Burnett. 2019. ‘Introduction: Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies’, Scandinavian Studies, (91, 1-2), 1-12.
[13] Moore, ‘Our Capitalogenic World’; Donna Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press; Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene; Helmuth Trischler. 2016. ‘The Anthropocene: A Challenge for the History of Science, Technology, and the Environment’, N.T.M. (24), 309–335; Jeremy Baskin. 2015. ‘Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Values (24): 9-29; Jedediah Purdy. 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Harvard University Press; Eileen Crist. 2013. ‘On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature’, Environmental Humanities (3): 129-147; Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2009. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry (35): 197-222; Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter (41): 17–18; Crutzen . 2002. ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature (415/51): 23.