The Death of Clark Glacier
Practices of Mourning and the Possibility of Post-Anthropogenic Memory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/lev92023136281Keywords:
memory studies, the Anthropocene, climate change, climate mitigation, cultural memory, mourning ritualsAbstract
Arguably, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is human-induced climate change. This article proposes the cultural memory of the Anthropocene as the dominant reason for our inadequate climate mitigation, whilst simultaneously arguing for the process of hoping-mourning as a possible solution. As such, this article analyzes the Anthropocene as a cultural memory, arguing for a restructuring of its milieu de mémoire to include other-than-human entities. The article finds that the hyper-separational framework of the Anthropocene limits our conceptual space on several spatiotemporal dimensions, limiting, and simplifying, our perception of time and space, excluding other-than-human entities. Furthermore, it is found that by sustaining corporeal vulnerability, mourning, and mourning rituals broaden the cultural domain, permitting other-than-human entities into our milieu de mémoire, which, through its transformative capabilities, offer new and much needed ways of imagining different futures and thus, essentially, different strategies of mitigation and adaptation.
References
Agarwal, Anil and Sunita Narain. “Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism.” India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, edited by Navroz K. Dubash, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 81-91.
Albrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia.” Alternatives Journal (Waterloo), vol. 32, no. 4/5, 2006, pp. 34-6.
Assmann, Aleida. “Memory, Individual and Collective.” The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. 2006, pp. 210-24. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.003.0011.
Assmann, Jan and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125-33. doi:10.2307/488538.
Babayeva, Svetlana. “Ivan Krastev: We do not Dream of the Future anymore, we’re Scared of it.” Russia in Global Affairs, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, pp. 202-11. doi:10.31278/1810-6374-2018-16-4-202.211.
Barasi, Leo. The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism. New Internationalist, 2017.
Bauhassira, Elza. “Clark Glacier Commemorated at Funeral in Oregon.” State of the Planet. Columbia Climate School, 2020. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/10/27/clark-glacier-funeral-oregon/. Accessed October 31, 2022.
Beck, Ulrich. The Metamorphosis of the World. Polity, 2016.
Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Polity Press, 2006.
Bird, Rose Deborah et al. “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-5. doi:10.1215/22011919-3609940.
Buell, Lawrence, “Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory.” Contesting Environmental Imaginaries, vol. 4, 2017, pp. 93-116.
Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2020, pp. 5-41.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Seventh History and Theory Lecture: Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory, vol. 57, nr. 1, 2018, pp. 5-32.
Comtesse, Hannah et al. “Ecological Grief as Response to Environmental Change: A Mental Health Risk or Functional Response?” International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health, vol. 18, nr. 2, 2021, pp. 1-10. doi:10.3390/ijerph18020734.
Craps, Stef. “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory.” Parallax, vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, pp. 479-92. doi:10.1177/1750698017731068.
Craps, Stef et al. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2018, pp. 498-515. doi:10.1177/1750698017731068.
Cunsolo, Ashlee and Neville R. Ellis. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-related Loss.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 8, n. 4, 2018, pp. 275-81. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Heise, Ursula K. “The Environmental Humanities and the Future of the Human.” New German Critique, vol. 43, no. 2, 2016, pp. 21-31. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.” Oxford University Press, 2008. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335637.001.0001.
De Cesari, Chiara and Ann Rigney. “Introduction.” Transnational Memory, 2014.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Pan Macmillan, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques et al. “By Force of Mourning.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, pp. 171-92.
Derrida, Jacques and Paul De Man. Memories for Paul de Man. Columbia University Press, 1986.
Freud, Sigmund and Adam Phillips. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Penguin, 2005.
Gutman, Yitaf et al. Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Halbwachs, Maurice et al. On Collective Memory. The University Chicago Press, 2010.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chtuhulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 2015, pp. 159-65. doi:10.1215/22011919-3615934.
Hartman, Steven. Contesting Environmental Imaginaries: Nature and Counternature in a Time of Global Change. BRILL, 2017.
Head, Lesley. “Past, Present and Future Temporalities.” Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Reconceptualising Human-nature Relations. Routledge, 2016, pp. 38-53.
Holm, Poul et al. “Humanities for the Environment – A Manifesto for Research and Action.” Humanities, vol. 4, no. 4, 2015, pp. 977-92. doi:10.3390/h4040977.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics and Amnesia.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 21-38. doi: 10.1215/08992363-12-1-21.
IPCC. “Summery for Policymakers: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/. Accessed on December 14, 2022.
Johnson, Lacy M. “How to Mourn a Glacier.” The New Yorker, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-to-mourn-a-glacier. Accessed October 31, 2022.
Kahn, Brian. “Mourners Hold a Funeral for a Dead Glacier.” Gizmodo, 2020. https://gizmodo.com/mourners-hold-a-funeral-for-a-dead-oregon-glacier-1845426351. Accessed on October 31, 2022.
Levy, Daniel. “Changing Temporalities and the Internationalization of Memory Cultures,” edited by Yitaf Gutman et al. Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 15-30.
Lindström, Kristina et al. “Sketching Hope and Grief in transition: Situating Anticipation in Lived Futures.” Journal of Design Practice, vol. 8, no. 1 & 2, 2021, pp. 17.1 – 17.22. doi: 10.1386/art_00017_1.
Lund, Christian. “Of What is this a Case?: Analytical Movements in Qualitative Social Science Research.” Human Organization, vol. 73, no. 3, 2014, pp. 224-34. doi: 10.17730/humo.73.3.e35q482014x033l4.
Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 62-9. doi:10.1177/2053019613516291.
Meyer, John W. et al. “World Society and the Nation State.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 103, nr. 1, 1997, pp. 144-81. doi:10.1086/231174.
Milman, Oliver. “’It’s Like a Rotten Carcass of Itself’: Funeral for an Oregon Glacier.” The Guardian, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/02/its-like-a-rotting-carcass-of-its-former-self-funeral-for-an-oregon-glacier. Accessed October 31, 2022.
Neimanis, Astrida and Rachel Loewen Walker. “Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality.” Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 3, 2014, pp. 558-75. doi:10.1111/hypa.12064.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26, 1989, p. 7-24. doi:10.2307/2928520.
Pahl, Sabine et al. “Perceptions of Tine in Relation to Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change, 5(3), 2014, 375-88. doi:doi-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/10.1002/wcc.272.
Park, Yon Soo and Benjamin Valentino. “Animals are People too: Explaining Variation in Respect for Animal Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2019, pp. 39-65. doi:10.1353/hrq.2019.0002.
“Pizol Glacier: Swiss Hold Funeral for Ice Lost to Global Warming.” BBC News, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49788483. Accessed October 31, 2022.
Plumwood, Val. “Nature in an Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review, no. 46, 2009.
Rigney, Ann. “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic.” Memory Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2018, pp. 368-80. doi:10.1177/1750698018771869.
Rigney, Ann. “Plentitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2005, pp. 011-28. doi:10.1177/0047244105051158.
Traer, Robert. Doing Environmental Ethics. Taylor and Francis, 2020.
Tsing, Anna. “The Political Economy of the Great Acceleration, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Climate, Capitalism and Communities, edited by Astrid B. Stensrud, Pluto Press, 2019, pp. 22-40. doi:10.2307/j.ctvjnrw0q.6.
Tsing, Anna et al. “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20.” Current Anthropology, vol. 60, no. S20, 2019, pp. 186-197. doi:10.1086/703391.
“UN List of Least Developed Countries.” UNCTAD. https://unctad.org/topic/least-developed-countries/list. Accessed December 6, 2022.
Van Dooren, Thom. “Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World.” Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 125-44.
Van Poeck, Katrien et al. “An Exploration of Sustainable Change Agents as Facilitators of Nonformal Learning: Mapping a Moving and Intertwined Landscape.” Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 2, 2017, p. 33. doi:10.5751/ES-09308-220233.
Verlie, Blanche. “Bearing Worlds: Learning to Live-with Climate Change.” Environmental Education Research, vol. 25, no. 5, 2019, pp. 751-66. doi:10.1080/13504622.2019.1637823.
White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science, vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203-7.
Willox, Ashlee Cunsolo. “Climate Change as Work of Mourning.” Ethics and the Environment, vol. 17, no. 2, 2012, pp. 137-64. doi:10.2979/ethicsenviro.17.2.137.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
You are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format).
However:
You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.