UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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393 research outputs found
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Stories from the Botanical Underground: Medicinal Plants as More-than-Human Knowledge Keepers
Full text linkPlants are intelligent keepers and communicators of more-than-human knowledge. Their stories relate the agency of place and plants, showing us how to live where we are, what it means to contribute to the continuance of life, and how to collaborate with nonhuman others in resilient place-making. Botanical storytelling reaffirms people-plant relations, reimagines human relationships with the land, and intervenes in prevailing social and environmental narratives. Stories from the Botanical Underground, presented at the 2023 American Association of Geographers conference, relates the ecological-social lives of betony (Pedicularis), globemallow (Sphaeralcea), and vervain (Verbena) and the knowledge they hold for navigating socio-environmental challenges. This collection of stories intends to de-center human impositions of colonial power upon botanical landscapes and re-center the teachings of place and plants on a damaged planet. In this research, medicinal plants themselves are recognized as primary contributors of knowledge. [...
STRATA: A Performance-Based Film Project on Deep Time in the Body and the Geologic
No full textThis article introduces a poem excerpted from the text of STRATA, VestAndPage’s fifth performance-based film project, which deals with the notion of deep time, the formation of layers in human history, memory, and the geological. The lyrics exemplify how VestAndPage resume through poetic words their thought process, the information gathered during their artistic research that led to the making of the film, and the felt emotions and perceived sensations while performing inside the Swabian Jura caves system, the location in which they chose to produce the film. The authors highlight topics that serve as the framework for their co-creative processes, such as transcendental imagination and queer ecology, in discussing their experience of making the film
Nature Loves to Hide: Navigating Surface and Depth in the Anthropocene
Full text linkWhile humans explore and map the subsurface environments of earth, there remain unplumbed depths of nature that cannot be so exposed. This essay argues that along with a literal sense of depth as a spatial dimension, there exists a latent depth of nature hidden to everyday perception that may nonetheless manifest in/as attentive imaginative involvement. It begins by briefly comparing the ontological assumptions of Newton and Descartes with those of Merleau-Ponty before examining how the everyday phenomenon of sunrise might be interpreted through the latter. The practice of terrapsychology is then explored as a means to deepen our engagement with(in) nature and sensitively navigate the necessary ambiguity of imaginative involvement. This latter is highlighted as a corrective to the logic of certainty and control that attempts to maintain human “progress” at the expense of more-than-human nature
In Depths
Full text linkStretching hydrophone recordings of diverse marine life with the whirring noises of radars and excavation equipment, In Depths is an acoustic exploration of deep sea entanglement, through which subterranean soundscapes echo and resound from the abyssopelagic to the ocean surface. Drawing upon Stacy Alaimo’s notion of abyssal temporalities, In Depths uses time-stretching production techniques to contemplate subaquatic assemblages, consider the cumulative costs of deep sea mining, and value temporalities of slowness in resistance to the accelerating rhythms of resource extraction.
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The audio file can be accessed at https://on.soundcloud.com/DdX3rHSoBTp9ccv8
"Water is Her Life Blood": The Waters of Bkejwanong and the Treaty-Making Process
Full text linkThis paper, originally presented over thirty years ago at a conference at Walpole Island, examines the waters of Bkejwanong, as reflected through the Treaty-making process, since the issuance of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Drawing on extensive historical research and documentation, the paper offers a unique insight into Treaty negotiations surrounding Indigenous water rights and title in Canada and the United States. In doing so, it helps explain the profound importance water holds in Walpole Island First Nations’ culture, heritage, and economy, not only as a crucial natural resource, or an essential aspect of Indigenous territorial sovereignty, but moreover as the life blood of Mother Earth, the beginning and the end of life
Introduction to "Thinking with More-Than-Human Subsurfaces"
Full text linkAs part of an interdisciplinary research team called “Thinking Deep,” which looks at “novel creative approaches to the subsurface” (Royal Holloway, University of London, n.d.), we registered a growing interest in the more-than-human subsurface across art, geography and beyond. As such, we put together a call for papers for the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, inviting papers that give thought to the environments below our feet—environments which have been “decentred from our imagination” (Hawkins, 2020, p. 4). In response, we received a wide range of interdisciplinary presentations that were willing to think-with cave-, marine- and soil-dwelling creatures; microbial networks and other elements of the subsurface. We ran two sessions and heard from academics and artists whose research centres the theme of the more-than-human within the subsurface, and who explore the ways in which our disciplines can best engage with these underground beings, habitats, and imaginaries. [...
The Future as an Underwater World: A Dream Comic
Full text linkThe climate crisis is high in all levels of our sub/un/consciousness. As flash flooding and sea level rising around the world occupy the headlines while a pandemic is still raging, a nocturnal dream in January 2021 inspired this comic. In ink pen and watercolour, the comic depicts a dream of a future where humans have survived and cities are built underwater, where all the human world is submerged. Offering dreaming as method, Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2011) explains how dreaming and theory are not exclusive of each other. Like Million (2011), dreamings for me have ‘led to further searches for meaning’. What are the teachings of our dreams? [...
Editorial Essay
Full text linkFrom the depths of Dante’s Inferno to Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, subterranean and subaquatic environments have often been depicted as repositories of primordial forces and abiding secrets in the Western tradition. The much-repeated (if somewhat misleading; e.g., Copley, 2014) claim that humans have “explored” more of outer space than of Earth’s oceans points to the mystique associated with the deepest regions of this planet. Though dramatic environmental changes are becoming increasingly evident all across the face of the Earth, we surface-dwellers can scarcely fathom what has been occurring below the ground and beneath the waves. In these deep places, rising temperatures deplete aquifers and destabilize sea beds; infrastructures (both old and new) wind through vast urban undergrounds; heavy industry delves ever deeper in its search for fossil fuels, rare earth metals, and geothermal energy; and plastics and other toxic contaminants come to settle among the extremophiles inhabiting the most remote reaches of the ocean.
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Beneath Clouded Hills: A More-Than-Human Approach to “Deep England”
Full text linkI’d like to tell you a story, ‘bout how England came to be…
So begins a retelling of Des Grantz Geanz, a more-than-human origin tale of England (Birt & Helle, 2023), which recounts how thirty exiled giants were the first to appear on Albion’s shores, named so after the eldest. Here, they lived in harmony with the existing flora and fauna until the tyrant Brutus invaded and made them flee underground. The tale starts off Beneath Clouded Hills (Figure 1), an artist film by Verity Birt and myself, which forms part of a wider art and research project in which we explore the ambiguous term “Deep England” (Birt & Helle, 2023).
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