fait accompli

burnt

Bush fire, Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, Australia.

Climate heating for southern Australia means drier conditions and increasing bush fires. In recent years  these fires have become very destructive mega fires.

Rolleiflex SL66,  Zeiss Planar 80mm, IIford HP 5 Plus, handheld

extinction

The drought continues in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia..   On a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome in South Australia.   

We are living through a mass extinction: a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way  in the Anthropocene.

Sony A7 R111,   handheld,  Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH

rock and granite

This is  old country that has undergone immense geological change over millions of years.  Humans may not survive the anthropocene but this country will. 

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

ruins 

This  pile of stones  near  Yudnyamutana looked to be  the ruins of a pastoralist’s shepherds hut.   It is hard for humans to live in the arid northern Flinders Ranges given the limited rainfall and water,  sparse vegetation, and frequent drought.

Yudnyamutana was the site of a copper mine located at Mount Freeling, It is north west of Arkaroola on the edge of the wilderness sanctuary.

We were making our way to begin to  walk down the Hamilton Creek. There is more on this walking on the 2018 camel trek  to Mt Hopeless on the Long Road  to the North  blog. This is the country of the  Adnyamathanha people (rock people) and  their ancestors have been the traditional owners and custodians of these ranges for over 50,000 years who lived in this country prior to European colonisation. They were semi-nomadic within certain well defined areas and  dispersed to make use of intermittent waters  after the rains and lived through the inhospital summers with their soaring temperatures.    

The northern Flinders Ranges is a  vast area comprising mountain   ranges formed from sedimentary crusts that are millions of years old,   the Flinders  were also the site of significant activity during colonial  incursion, the ruins of which now litter the region.

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

Movement  2. 

At this point the  project/book starts a new movement or section. This is  one based on,  and around, images produced in Australia whilst walking on a camel trek in the northern Flinders Ranges. This is  an arid landscape with limited water and it portends one  possible future in the Anthropocene.  

............................................................................................................................

One consequence of   climate heating in the anthropocene for the southern part of Australia is reduced rainfall and prolonged drought. That means the creeks  stop flowing,  the water holes in the region dry up and the animals die.  

Whilst on a camel trek  in  South Australia’s  Northern Flinders Ranges  in 2018 I  noticed that there was almost  no water in the land for both the trees and the wild animals to drink. The fauna and flora of the bioregion’s biodiversity is reduced. 

It was hard to escape the conclusion whilst walking on this land with the camels that the human impact  on  the environment is now so embedded in nature  that is is becoming difficult to discern any trace or remnant of the natural which is not shaped by human praxis. 

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

Benmore Dam 

Nature is defined as that which is independent of human activity in the sense that it is  not a humanly created product.  History is a record the production and reproduction of life in the context of a struggle with nature. 

The  central argument in Adorno and Horkheimer’s  Dialectic of the Enlightenment turns on a  nature-dominating reason liberating us from the grip of nature, at the same time as it ensnares us all the more tightly in a second nature of our own making.  Second nature, in the form of  late capitalist society with its systematic mastery over nature, threatens to destroy the very conditions for life on the planet.

We are stuck in an anthropomorphism that blinds us to others perspectives as it treats the rest of nature as an exploitable resource.  

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

The Great Acceleration--2020

This phrase refers to the  increasing human pressure on the Earth System as exemplified by this industrial style salmon farm near Twizel in the southern McKenzie Basin.     

The Earth had left the  steady-state Holocene and entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, driven by the impact of human activities on the Earth System from the start of the industrial revolution onwards.

There was a dramatic change in magnitude and rate of the human imprint from about 1950 onwards especially with increasing mobility of the circuits of capital, people and  culture with globalization in the 1990s.

Does the idea of the twilight of the idols of globalization--small state, free markets, inequality, the free movement of capital, extraction,  etc--with their dream of a human futurity (always better, always more human, more rational) make sense?

Do  the  tipping points of the Anthropocene and corporate denialism about climate heating mean that  tapping these idols of globalization--sounding them out--- with Nietzsche’s hammer or tuning fork  results in a hollow sound?  Or is this mode of thinking too romantic, murky, too nineteenth century, a time of whale-oil-lamps and corsets?

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

ruined futures--2018

We are faced with the collective failure to deal with the looming  cataclysmic  and catastrophic consequences of climate heating. The world’s most powerful nations,  the biggest carbon footprint countries, adopt the ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’ explicitly or otherwise. These countries, still in the grip of neo-liberalism’s let the rigged market rule, remain  fully committed  to the growth-without-end paradigm.

A central challenge of the Anthropocene: is  how can we learn to recognize that different forms of disaster (from a freak tornado in Delhi to an especially deep drought in California, bush fires in Australia) are manifestations of our deranged relationship with the natural environment?

Such recognition is especially difficult because it too easily looks credulous and fantastical—climate change, in short, requires an imposition of improbable events on an otherwise realistic narrative.

Anglo-American photography in late modernity has  been centred on the human, on human subjectivity, on individual identity,  on the avant-garde, rather than the non-human.  Modernism’s presentation of the world as so much psychological flux and affect was in   a period that coincided with an accelerating human imprint on planetary ecosystems. Climate heating’s  uncanny aspect--its extremes of superstorms, droughts, floods, sea level rise—is  on the limits of  the conceptual grasp and visual rhetoric of contemporary  photography that  wrestles with it.

What is put into question is the idea of modernity. This  term assumes  that humans emerge from the primordial darkness, as independent entities living and acting on a separate physical world, a world we plough up, mine, build on and move over but which nevertheless has an independent existence and destiny. Modernity connotes the ideas of individualism and freedom, the questioning of tradition, the notion of linear time going toward increased progress, a sense of the novelty of the future, and a rupture with the past.

Not to be modern is to be old-fashioned, backward, barbaric, uncivilized. Yet the direction in which we thought we were going has now been denied to us,  as we have reached the point in history where we must face up to the tragic consequences of modernity.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

optical unconscious--2015

 In his  “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin claims that the camera enables the discovery of the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis enabled the discovery of the instinctual unconscious. This statement is followed by  the following  passage:

“Moreover, these two types of unconscious [the optical and instinctual] are intimately linked. For in most cases the diverse aspects of reality captured by the film camera lie outside the normal spectrum of sense impressions. Many of the deformations and stereotypes, transformations and catastrophes which can assail the optical world in films afflict the actual world in psychoses, hallucinations, and dreams. Thanks to the camera, therefore, the individual perceptions of the psychotic and the dreamer can be appropriated by collective perception. The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, have been invalidated by film—and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating figures of collective dream, such as the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse.”

The pivot point is not photography’s so-called indexical relationship to reality, but rather its proximity to fantasy.  Photography’s political potential lies not in its ability to document material reality, but rather in its profound link to psychic structures.  Unconscious impulses and desires  guide visual perception. They also shape the way that climate change has been traditionally ignored in order to protect the status quo of a carbon economy.   We are on the edge of a new era in which many of our past habits of thought and practice have become blinders which prevent us from perceiving the realities of our present situation.

Paralysis and denial in relation to   the unthinkable, the uncanny and the catastrophic. If the  Anthropocene requires that we think of humans as a species, then the  narrative is this: there is a species, and part of that species decides initially that it is exceptional at a moral and rational level, but then declares—late in the day—that the species is better described neither as moral nor as rational, but as constituted by destruction. 

Walter Benjamin,  “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Second Version (1936), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1931–1938, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), pp. 117–118.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

Hostile  landscapes--2018

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) landmark 2018 study on warming argues  that there are crossable thesholds which represent red lines for averting the worst effects of global warming. Crossing them--eg., heating the atmosphere beyond 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius---would spell unquantifiable but devastating damage to biodiversity and the globe’s natural processes, such as oceanic currents.

A series of dire feedback loops would kick in. The melting of Arctic permafrost, for example, which would further heat the earth’s atmosphere. Heat waves, droughts, raging wildfires and other forms of extreme weather will increase in frequency and severity. Agriculture will become less reliable and suffer declining yields. Rising sea-levels will mean the submersion of many coastal regions and Pacific Islands such as the Marshall Islands and those of French Polynesia. 

In a  world in ecological crisis, many landscapes will become hostile to human beings. Nature’s narrative, as it were, frames the human species, placing the anthropos within the scale and register of earth system science, which  represents  the earth as a living inter-connected system.

We are faced with a stark choice, either we radically transform the world or we are doomed.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

Royal Albatross colony 2020

International tourists at the  albatross colony at Taiaroa Head, on the Otago Peninsula in Dunedin.

The tourist image, for instance,  is one of a picture postcard of pure NZ:  a scenic wonderland, blessed with pristine environments and a unique landscape. It is the land of purity, unspoiled landscapes, and an authentic experience.

What we come to photograph is both New Zealand as such and New Zealand as a cultural construct--a  New Zealand/Aotearoa of the imagination. This is not to  introduce textuality into an otherwise  material as such;every fact, every reported event, every filmed disaster, every declaration of drought, every discussion of just where the Anthropocene starts and stops or what constitutes a tipping point  is already within language.

Language is material  not as the medium through which thought communicates, but a multiplicity of relations and traces that enables what comes to experience itself as word or image. 

Sony a7 R111, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

Waimakariri River, Canterbury

Flying across the eastern side of the high country in Canterbury on route from Christchurch to Melbourne  in 2017,  after attending my mother’s funeral at  her  local  Catholic parish church in St Albans,  Christchurch. 

Photography mediates our experience of the world and it   has become one of the principal filters between the world and us. These are sublime landscapes that are inaccessible to most international tourists--sublime  in the Romantic sense of the magnitude of nature overpowering nature.

Nature in the sense of eternal and everlasting—a nature that would provide some ground for our nostalgia and yearning.  A sublime nature as some “x” that is unrepresentable, untheorizable, and beyond any possible experience.

In photographing them I am aware that these photos are filtered through a web of preconceptions ---aesthetic, intellectual, social, and political--that come from mass media, literature, art history and photography.  

Picturesque New Zealand is what  the international tourists  from Europe and Asia come to experience and picture. It’s the real thing (wild nature ) compared to Disneyland in the US.

Sony NEX-7, Leica Summicron 35mm f2.0 ASPH, handheld

Tourism

This is tourism on the one day trek  on the Tongariro Alpine Crossing in 2015.  Will tourism related economic growth continue to be viewed as  an escape for the many from the drudgery of everyday social life in the Anthropocene?

Modern tourism mobility is fossil-fuel-dependent as the New Zealand tourism industry almost entirely relies on international arrivals. Those who come to visit New Zealand  arrive mostly by air. This makes tourism within the Anthropocene a problem.

Tourism can  no longer  be seen as just an  escape from the boredom  of ordinary everyday life and selfies in exotic landscapes;  the travel practices  of tourists are  also about increasing carbon emissions,  consumption of earthly resources,   the degradation of the earth and environmental sustainability.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

Whakaari  (2018) + allegory

In  Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M.DeLoughrey says that allegory has long relied on the figure of the island to engage the scalar telescoping between local and global, island and Earth. The island’s simultaneous boundedness and its permeability to travelers—and therefore its susceptibility to radical change—have made it a useful analogue for the globe as a whole. New Zealand, itself,  consists of a number of islands, including two main ones.

Ever since Walter Benjamin published his work on the Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play), allegory has been understood as a paradoxical form that renders often irreconcilable narratives about the human relation to the past and to nonhuman nature. After Benjamin, it is generally agreed that allegory signals an era of calamity and a way of responding, inadequately but necessarily, to crisis.

Leica M4-P, Leitz Summicron 35mm f2.0, Kodak Portra 400ASA

Whakaari/White Island --2018

There was a flash point of understanding about the   power of  non-human nature. on  my  visit to Whakaari in February 2018. Whakaari/White Island is a live volcano. I was up close, walking around it, peering into the crater.   The volcano  could easily erupt. If it did  whilst I was on the island I would be deeply burned or killed, if I was unable to make it back to the boat.  

It did erupt nearly two years later--on  9 December 2019. Forty-seven people were reportedly on the island when it erupted. A second eruption closely followed the first.

These  eruptions  resulted in 20 fatalities, including two people who are missing and presumed dead.Twenty-five survivors were seriously injured, many critically and suffering severe burns.This is a  hard way to learn to recognize  an active, nonhuman nature and planet.

An active non-human nature needs to be part of the narrative that we tell ourselves in order to find our bearings in the  crisis situation of climate heating. 

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

 in the Hooker Valley --2009

The epoch has changed.

It is  a simple phrase. It rolls off the tongue  easily in a conversation whilst we we were driving the camper van through the Hooker Valley to Aoraki/Mt Cook in 2009.  The implications  of this phrase on  the  road trip were slow to sink in. 

It does mean that the state giving  the globalized free market control of the future of the planet was a wrong turn. This held that economic growth has to supported/ facilitated/ subsidized in the name of freedom, good governance and public order.  Our prosperity depends on it.  The damage it causes--including destroying the environment --- is the price we pay for economic growth. The excesses can be regulated through good governance.

Nature rudely intrudes on this narrative with its subtext of there is no other way,  Wild nature  imposes itself upon us.  Several degrees of warming are  setting  off an uncontrollable disruption of the climate (runaway climate change).

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld

Ocean--2011

The  Punakaiki Pancake Rocks and the Blowholes Walk in the Paparoa National Park  are  an iconic  tourist location in  the northern part of  the South Island’s Westland region. 

Whilst standing there in the late afternoon light  in 2009 looking at the Tasman Sea I  started to understand that  the warming and rising levels of the ocean,  along with  the chemistry of the ocean changing as the ocean becomes more acidic, was a part of the human transformation  of the world.  With  climate change   we are  shaping the world around us.  Sea level rise may be one of our greatest visible signs of planetary change, connecting the activity of the earth’s poles with the rest of the terrestrial world. 

How can the universalizing figure of the Anthropocene  be grounded by engaging specific places such as New Zealand?

The island nations in the Pacific have been and continue to be at the forefront of ecologically devastating climate change.Their people are very aware that human activity has attained the scale of a geological force akin to a volcanic eruption or a meteorite, changing the Earth as a system.

As Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner,  the Marshall Islands performance poet, puts it: 

..“tell them about the water

how we have seen it rising

flooding across our cemeteries

gushing over the sea walls

and crashing against our homes

Tell them what it’s like

to see the entire ocean _level_with the land”...

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Tell Them

This poem  employs allegory to figure the island as a world in ecological crisis, depicts an active, nonhuman ocean agent, and articulates the imperative to both witness and testify to a dynamic, changing Earth.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld