Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities

Description

Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis  In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s.  Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmansah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U.  COVER Half-title Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Introduction: Environmental Humanities across Times, Disciplines, and Research Practices by Carolyn Fornoff, Patricia Eunji Kim, and Bethany Wiggin Part I. Variations and Methods Chapter 1. Time Bomb: Pessimistic Approaches to Climate Change Studies by Jason Bell and Frank Pavia Chapter 2. Earth’s Changing Climate: A Deep-Time Geoscience Perspective by Jane E. Dmochowski and David A. D. Evans Chapter 3. Deep Time and Landscape History: How Can Historical Particularity Be Translated? by Ömür Harmansah ETUDE 1. A Period of Animate Existence Chapter 4. Staging Climate: A Period of Animate Existence and the Global Imaginary by Marcia Ferguson Chapter 5. A Period of Animate Existence by Troy Herion, Mimi Lien, and Dan Rothenberg Chapter 6. Conversations with Dan Rothenberg, Director of A Period of Animate Existence by Bethany Wiggin Part II. Variations, Fast and Slow Chapter 7. Time Machines and Timelapse Aesthetics in Anthropocenic Modernism by Charles M. Tung Chapter 8. Fishing for the Anthropocene: Time in Ocean Governance by Jennifer E. Telesca ETUDE 2. WetLand Chapter 9. WetLand Manifesto by Mary Mattingly Chapter 10. Figuring WetLand by Kate Farquhar Part III. Repetitions and Variations Chapter 11. Vanishing Sounds: Thoreau and the Sixth Extinction by Wai Chee Dimock Chapter 12. Hoopwalking: Human Rewilding and Anthropocene Chronotypes by Paul Mitchell Chapter 13. Dirt Eating in the Disaster by Iemanjá Brown ETUDE 3. Futurity Unknown Chapter 14. The Memory of Plants: Genetics, Migration, and the Construction of the Future by Beatriz Cortez Coda by Carolyn Fornoff, Patricia Eunji Kim, and Bethany Wiggin Contributors