Gleaning Place, Territory and Local Knowledge

image source

In my institutional days my primary academic interest was in critical and applied approaches to medical anthropology,  ethnoecology and political ecology (specifically with regards to environmentally resonant indigenous resistance movements). That was then, this is now – but I’m still very interested in those subjects, always trying to learn more about human behavior, identity, meaning-making, and how people carve out existences within particular biosocialcultural niches.

The ebook and paper linked below explicitly deal with understanding humans in particular environments and the different ways we understand our place in the world.

First, Johnson’s recently published book is a detailed study of traditional environmental knowledge  (TEK) among Gitksan, Witsuwit’en and Dene peoples. It is a fantastic resource for those interested in anthropological approaches to ecology and traditional (alternative) knowledge. It can be rather technical at times, but well worth the read for any of you anthro and environmental studies students.

Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path: Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape

by Leslie Main Johnson (2010)

In this volume, the author begins by examining key concepts, including ethnoecology, landscape and landscape ecology and a range of approaches that people have taken in approaching the domain of cultural knowledge of land and landscapes. In a series of chapters, she addresses: Gitksan ethnoecology, and the linkage of landforms and overall orientation systems to social structure and the storied landscape; Witsuwit’en landscape ethnoecology; people and landscape in northwest British Columbia, with focus on a key ecological type, the berry patch; the ethnoecology of Dene (Athapaskan speakers) in northern Canada, including Kaska and Gwich’in landscape knowledge, with consideration of commonalities and contrasts in Dene ethnoecology; named places; and the contrasts between indigenous landscape ethnoecology and the classification of habitats and landscapes in Western scientific thought, and the implications of these differences for how knowledge about landscape is presented and apprehended. In her concluding chapter, she reflects on landscape ethnoecology and on its potential to inform social and ecological sciences, land management, and contemporary political debates.

Read the Entire eBook @ Athabasca University Press

The second offering is from Stuart Elden, professor of political geography at Durham University, in the UK and author of the Progressive Geographies weblog. The paper is not open access, but, again, for those of you interested it looks to be an interesting read so you may want to access it somehow. [h/t to Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error for bringing this to my attention]

Land, Terrain, Territory
by Stuart Elden

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control – the technical and the legal – must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.

Learn More @ Sage Journals Online

Capital Flows, Polity and Global Resonance Machines

.
William E. Connolly is a politically science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a distinguished professor Connolly has received numerous awards for his writing on social theory and political commentary. Connolly's work fluidly integrates the theories of continental thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault with a post-Marxist penchant for political economics into an immanent and progressive theory of democratic contestation and engagement. His early book, Terms of Political Discourse received the Lippincott Award in 1999 given to an "outstanding work" still important "at least fifteen years after publication". His recent books include Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002); Pluralism (2005), and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). He is currently completing a book project entitled A World of Becoming.

The video below features a recent lecture delivered by Connolly as the keynote at the Watson Institute’s “Global Security Regimes in the Making?” conference. His talk was entitled, “Capital Flows, Sovereign Practices and Global Resonance Machines”.

In clear language, Connolly deploys the concept of the “resonance machine” in an attempt to elaborate his own framework for discussions about national security and global geopolitics. Connolly describes resonance machines as a complex, abstract, mobile, and unpredictable structures that unite disparate, but related political and social phenomena in a self-reinforcing network - the parts of which are in constant dialogue. For Connolly these ‘machines’ are “self-organizing” and have “no central agent in control”, but are assembled from a myriad of component parts which are deeply ‘interpenetrated.’” Moving from Hegel to Immanuel Wallerstein and Gilles Deleuze, Connolly touches on what he believes are some of the major antagonisms animating the field of international politics. This lecture provides a cogent example of how we can apply continental theory to political discourse in efforts to increase the scope and complexity of our political considerations. Enjoy:

I may have much more to say about Connolly’s model of "immanent naturalism" - which seems to be a variant of actualism - as I continue to get into his work, but I can say at this point I have some serious reservations about how he (following Deleuze) and others use the term ‘machines’ to denote the structural elements of complex living ecologies.

Despite this, I believe that Connolly's thinking displays a degree of flexibility and concreteness that is necessary in order to get past the use of traditional ideologies, bypass distracting philosophical arguments and begin engaging more practical and intelligence approaches to politics and social reality.

Let Freedom Reign

Relational Objects and Intensive Beings

Apologies up front, because this post is necessarily much too dense. My intention is to provide as precise account of my own ontological leanings as possible. I do so because, frankly, I’m tired of rendering problematics that are, for me, already solved or accepted as irrelevant in superfluous ways. Summer is almost over for hell’s sake! And there is much more to think about than models and metaphysics.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to read Levi Bryant’s post riffing on comments I made about the need to take relationality seriously. Of course, anyone reading Larval Subjects knows that Bryant addresses relations by positing objects manifesting qualities in relational ways. But the notion of virtual proper being as that which ‘withdraws’ from actuality remains for many a ghost. And, at least for me, the idea of real entities as being somehow “split” is an unnecessary specter in Levi’s otherwise brilliant ontology.

Alternatively, I remain convinced that we must instead seek out the source of individuality in the expressible properties and affective potency of actual objects. Virtuality, whether posited as the hidden potentials of temporal objects, or as the mathematically-real ‘signatures’ (or latencies) of dynamical systems, or as a crypto-Platonic ‘essence’ of intangible withdrawal, is a concept completely unnecessary for the task of coping with and encountering real objects in the world. And, to be sure, the consequential and relational nature of the encounters and copings between real entities precedes any attempts at modeling or codifying them.

Moreover, the contingent character of objects, assemblages, units, sparrows or NGOs is only ever encountered in contact with the affective capacities or powers embodied by actual entities. The capacities, or what Bennett calls ‘thing-power’, expressed by actual entities are unleashed from the immanent depths of the assembled temporal and relational properties of particular things. Thus coping with the individuality and force (affects) of particular entities requires attenuation to objects by objects through the capacities particular to specific entities. [And by ‘coping’ I mean something more general: as quasi-Heideggerian imperatives inherent to particular beings as such. For example, as humans we cope mainly biologically, but rocks cope mainly minerally.] Riding waves of and as contingent actualities we humans pre-consciously take up the tasks of encountering (‘being-with’) and coping by virtue of our particular and relative variant of being – i.e., the specific properties of our ‘being-towards’.

Conversely, “change”, then, is not something that needs to be explained by way of the operations of metaphysically withdrawn objects, as if temporality is one side of an epic binary waiting to be switched on. Rather, change is the inherent movement of all beings as primordial relations gathered up and extended as variously differentiated and distributed temporal properties. That is to say, change is not something that happens to objects or entities – but rather change is the intrinsic condition of the being and becoming of existing kosmic properties. Change is the very condition necessary for individuation to occur.

In fact, the very individuality that object-oriented thinkers want to objectify is a consequence and consequential (and therefore meaningful) effect of coalesced or assembled extensive properties intensively organized. As a result of their contingent and temporal nature, object-assemblages are forever vulnerable (and thereby relatively accessible) to other object-assemblages, and also to the more diffuse affective dynamics at play in any particular situation. And here I use “situation” as a technical term for the variable confluence of extensive properties and intensive relations.

The moral of this particular onto-story, then, is simply that if we are to take relationality seriously we must also take temporality seriously, and taking temporality seriously means recognizing the inherent ‘vulnerability’ and openness of entities as they actually exist. And any human project that purports to frame the things-in-themselves, that is to say any declared realist endeavor, must eventually let go of essentialist thinking (characterized by a belief in ‘essences’) and content itself with attenuating and mapping the actual contingencies revealed (or disclosed) through and to us by our very own relative natures. Only then does speculation lead to praxis.

Medical Agency and Plural Ontologies

Judith Farquhar (University of Chicago), "Plural Ontologies, Medical Agency: How Chinese Medicine Argues About Being":

SCA MEETING 2010 - Judith Farquhar from Cultural Anthropology on Vimeo.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at the University of Chicago. She conducts research on traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. Anthropological areas of interest include medical anthropology; the anthropology of knowledge and of embodiment; critical theory and cultural studies; and theories of reading, writing, and translation.

Ray Brassier - The Pure and Empty Form of Death

The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Deleuze and Heidegger, by Ray Brassier:

In Difference and Repetition, the third synthesis of time is the privileged locus for an apocalyptic individuation whereby, in a striking inversion of Heidegger, the future 'ungrounds' the past and death become the subject of a time that splits the Self. For Deleuze, contra Heidegger, time, like death, is never 'mine': it is no-one's. The affirmation of eternal recurrence effects a mode of psychic individuation which transforms thought into a sign of impersonal death.

From ACTUAL VIRTUAL - APRIL 2006:

Watch More @ YouTube

IPCC Chairman Cleared of All Accusations

Just so everyone is quite clear, the much maligned chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri has been completely vindicated against charges of financial wrong-doings and conflicts of interest by an independent panel set up to investigate accusations made by prominent global warming deniers. The review of the IPCC chairman's financial relationships by respected auditors KPMG published today clearly reveals just how scrupulously and honest Pachauri has been since taking up the role of leading the widely respected UN research project.

For a while now, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri's "dodgy" business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest. Now it appears there is just one problem for denial-heads: the story was completely untrue. Pachauri’s total additional income over the 20 months reviewed by KPMG amounted to £45,000 from his salary at The Energy and Resources Institute, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings related to his publications and board work. So much for Pachauri's "highly lucrative commercial jobs" amounting to "millions of dollars".

As per usual, however, truth matters little to the main oil and gas lobbyists involved – all conveniently presented in public as so-called “climate skeptics”. No doubt the corporate paid lobbyists will simply move on to the next target of slander and obfuscation in their efforts to discredit legitimate research and concern over global warming. By continuing their war against science and extending their well-funded campaigns of confusion denial-professionals hope to render the public debate over global warming unintelligible by bogged down discourse with irrelevant mud-slinging and anti-science propaganda – even as the scientific debate over human-accelerated global warming has been clear for several years.

Read the full KPMG report: here

I Got Love

As the immortal Marshall Mather’s once proclaimed, “it’s so good to be back!” I just arrived home from another incredible 10 days deep in the mountains of Jasper National Park. For those of you who don’t know, Jasper National Park is the largest wilderness park in the Canadian Rockies and an official World Heritage Site. The park encompasses more than 10,000 square km, and has more than 1,000 km in hiking trails.

I was there embedded with a team of researchers tracking and studying the movements, environs and life-ways of the two main herds of Woodland Caribou who live the Park. The Woodland Caribou is formally a “species at risk”, and recent surveys indicate that both Jasper herds are in decline. The northern herd is estimated at 150 animals. The south Jasper herd, numbering around 100, is down from counts of 450 surveyed in the early 1960's. Based on these trends, population models predict that the south Jasper woodland caribou herd could be completely gone in 40 years. It's difficult to determine why the woodland caribou are disappearing. Limited patches of high quality habitat, increased predation by wolves, climate change, and the direct and indirect effects of human activity are all factors – but tracking the life-ways of these amazing animals will help us understand more about the issues.

One highlight of the trip was a perilously close early morning encounter with a robust pack of wolves – resulting in our team setting off numerous flares to persuade our visitors to augment their journey and hunt elsewhere. I love those beasts! So much intensity.

There is something so invigorating about being in the mountains, walking through ancient forests in pursuit of wild species. I always try to imagine how our pursuits up there might somehow feel similar to those intrepid tribal hunters who once traversed those same forests. Of course, our adventure was strictly scientific and not at all propelled by the necessity to subsist in a wild world of precarious existence, but nonetheless…

What this latest trip really brought home, however, in just how much a need to think through and develop my central theoretical project: the pragmatic implications for an ontographic approach to the wilderness of being. As entities 'thrown' into the world we must find and make our way in a world full of wild, uncanny and strange beings and environments. We are confronted on all sides by forces, objects, flows and contexts which exceed our control, overflow our understandings and often try to destroy, devour or entangle us. Yet, there is also an abundance to Being that affords us the conditions from which we can build our lives. The rich flora and fauna of Being is simultaneously our mother, our matrix, and our calling. And everything hinges on how we explore this vast and intimate wilderness and what we can enact within it.

This manner of framing is at the core of everything I say, write and do. And I hope to develop my thoughts further whenever possible.

But, for now, I’m back in the city and looking forward to getting back to writing, blogging and all such networked activities. I have several topics I want to comment on, and a few good posts in draft I hope to post in the next few days, so please have patience as I get back into the electro-flow of things.

In the meantime, sit back, chill out and watch-listen to the resonant beauty expressed so passionately in the video below. It’s true – I GOT LOVE! Enjoy.

Of Objects and Assemblages

Jeremy at Eidetic Illuminations has a fantastic post up asking, "Are Cultures Objects?". He's raising some great questions about the efficacy of the Object-Oriented project. I want to touch briefly on a few issues he raises:

I think Jeremy pins down exactly what needs to be thought about when he asked, “…at what point can a set of relations be said to have turned into an object?” This is very important because the language he used actually offers a way forward. He asked ‘at what point’? – and the answer is: precisely at the point something becomes more rather than less differentiated from its background context.

But there’s the rub! No-thing is ever completely separate or differentiated from its context. Both Einstein and quantum physics argue exactly this. Things, or objects, are only ever relatively differentiated from the ecology within which they emerge. All things depend (or interdepend) on other things. But, as Bryant pointed out, not all things interdepend (my word) on other things at the same time. It is not that all things are directly related to each other, but that all things exist under certain circumstances and depend upon particular conditions and background relations. And, to return, it is the degree to which any coalesced assemblage becomes relatively differentiated from the life-conditions (form of life) within which it always partakes and co-creates that it can be said to be an ‘object’ unto itself.

Think embryos. Within the matrix of a womb an embryo can be seen to be an ‘object’ (or, rather, an assemblage) relatively distinct from its mother. But should you remove that embryo from its life-conditions (from the womb) it would certainly perish and de-assemble. Object-assemblages simply cannot be ‘removed’ from the matrix of reality, and any suggestion that ‘objects’ somehow have some special ontological status outside the relational contexts in which they dwell is not telling the whole-story. So unlike embryos that become foetuses and eventually leave the matrix of their mothers, WE cannot leave the womb of materiality and our deeply ecological reality – we depend on it. Just like every other object-assemblage that actually exists.

For me, somewhat following DeLanda (and he following Deleuze), all ‘objects’ are assemblages. Some assemblages are more ‘loose’ and some are more stable, but all such beasts always exist in relation. I think, contra Bogost and Morton, the concept of an assemblage can do more ‘work’ than the term object – at least the way DeLanda uses it – because ‘assemblage’ captures the simultaneous-ness of conjunctive and disjunctive relations and of whole/parts (mereology). It’s a more indicative term.

So at various points things either move towards becoming more rather than less of an object, or they disassemble, or deterritorialize, and become less of an object. Therefore, there must be certain “thresholds” (or certain “tipping points”) where assemblages ostensibly become individuals rather than continue to exist as a) multiplicities, or b) hybrid transgressors. And of course there are assemblage-things that hover ‘in between’ being an individual and a multiplicity (or ‘society’), such as certain organisms or ant colonies.

It is a matter of degree.

This thresholding of immanent reality is why it is more important, in my view, to always investigate the world of things in their particulars (with all their onto-specific idiosyncrasies). To truly respect the “strange mereology” of the world-itself (rather than of OOO), we have to respect the specific determining properties and characteristics of each and every situation or assemblage. [Isn’t this also exactly what ethnography teaches us about understanding the local?]

And this, incidentally, is for me the exact difference between ontography and ontology. Ontography speculatively maps particulars, while ontology speculatively abstracts generalities. Both are useful , but ontography must remain fundamental, in a way that mirrors how ethnography is more fundamental than ethnology.

With regards to culture, I have all but abandoned that concept myself - because, as you, Max and many others have pointed out, there are so many connotations at play with that term. ‘Is culture an object?’ Depends on what you are willing to objectify.

Certainly there are cultural objects. For example, a totem pole. A totem pole is a tree that has been transformed by humans and inscribed with symbolic meanings. Thus, the totem pole is an object-assemblage of wood, paint and symbolic representation which combine in such a way as to create a new ‘culturally’ recognizable object. But the question then becomes ‘what is the relationship of the totem pole to various other elements (object-assemblages)’?

Is there enough of a relationship between human beings, language, totem-poles (artifacts) and other objects that we can say that its assembly is itself an object? Has a particular crowd of distributed objects intensified its relations enough to cross the ‘threshold’ of multiplicity and become a unity? In what way does "it" act as an object? And the only way we judge that is relative to the context in which these things occur, and relative to the specific affects (capacities and powers) expressed by all the immanent and coalesced properties involved.

That is to say, we must do ontography rather than ontology to determine the specific properties and affect dynamics (my term) occurring in any particular context.

So, the problem I have with considering culture an ‘object’, or any given social milieu a distinct ‘society’, is that it seems to objectify situations involving intricately differentiated phenomena with amazingly diffuse relationships. Human populations exist among so much complexity that to draw boundaries around too wide a gathering of people, places and things is ‘imagine’ too much. At best, cultures are loose assemblages and not, in my opinion, intensive OR extensive enough to be ‘objects’ per se.

The Perpetual Wound

I just read Mark Fisher’s blog post on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction-ism – which inevitably led me to the recent Derrida debates circulating within the OOO niche. In light of those discussions, I want to weigh-in on a few things: First, I generally find Fisher’s blog K-PUNK a fantastic read. Mark is articulate and informed – and more interestingly, for me, he is often a cogent critic of the pathologies inherent in capitalist systems and culture. His most recent book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) is a short but allegedly scathing analysis of capitalist procedures and discourse. I have not read the book yet (it’s on my October reading list!), but from what I can tell it will be well worth the engagement.

Second, I agree with Mark’s argument that many claims made about Derrida (for example, about being too focused on texts, textuality and language) are criticisms of methodology, rather than suggestions that Derrida literally thinks reality is composed of texts. Make no mistake about it: Derrida, despite his brief forays into art and architecture, was mainly concerned with the interpretation and critique of textual artifacts. And most of Derrida’s own expressive efforts were focused on producing texts. But, I believe, any serious reading of Derrida’s later texts in particular would reveal that he is not claiming that the universe is only a multiplicity of texts, but that he finds it useful and necessary to focus on most cultural expressions as if they were texts. On the merit or illegitimacy of such an approach I’ll let the reader judge.

But where I don’t follow Fisher is when he implies that Derrida’s work was not philosophy:

“…much of what is interesting about Derrida comes from his interstitial position between literary theory and philosophy, the way that he drew philosophical implications from supposedly "literary" features of texts. I'm not saying that a philosophy couldn't be construed from elements of Derrida's work. But turning it into A Philosophy is already "to do violence" to it.”

I think it important to look a little closer. For me, Derrida’s work was so much ‘interstitial’ and transgressive that it seemingly exploded the false boundary between literature and philosophical works. So when someone says that Derrida was in the main a literary critic or theorist rather than a philosopher they seem to miss the point of his work completely. Derrida showed us that all writing is fundamentally an artifact of surface variations within one particular and historical mode of expression or communication. He also definitively demonstrated how what we take from any text will depend in large part on the subconscious conceptual systems we adopt, accumulate and inhabit, and how, if we are to move past the contingent and tentative nature of language and writing, we will need to develop the capacity for reflexive and creative interpretations of the social world.

The core potency of Derrida’s work for me, however, was his demonstration of how language and conceptual thinking are fundamentally indeterminate - with limits and potentials that could be pushed but not transcended. Derrida’s uncloaking of the limits of semantic reasoning through textual ‘deconstruction’ begged questions about human expressive artifacts more generally, and opened the door for more ‘playful’, ironic and reflexive understandings of “truth”, rationality and human speech-acts. At best, Derrida’s writings are a skillful means of prompting those of us of the literate persuasion to be less ridged and more creative with our own communications and claims to truth.

Many anthropologists say similar things when we argue that all discourses are stories: culturally emanated (contingent) narratives that vary over time and space and context, and which can alternatively reinforce attitudes, provide explanations, mark differences, educate, inspire, trigger emotions, deepen collective memories, and/or resonate hitherto unknown possibilities. These stories (cf. Bennett's term 'onto-story') also always contribute to how we perceive and understand the world. And so genres (i.e., philosophical writings, literary writings, pornographic writings), for the most part, are more cultural distinctions than actual distinct species of knowledge.

So we don’t need to “do violence” to Derrida’s work by turning it into something more manageable or systemic, because we need only let it be what it is: both a reminder and a method. It is a reminder for us to perpetually acknowledge the limits and inherent playfulness of language and conceptual thinking. And it is a method because the ‘deconstruction’ approach is capable of teasing apart any particular truth-claim or body of truth-claims, and helps us seek out the hidden semantic and connotative treasures (or lines of flight?) in textual expressions. Moreover, Deconstruction, broadly, fuses this general methodological approach to reading texts with an attitude of accepting the limits of language and conceptuality to provide a fresh perspective on the limits and capacities of human cognition.

I think much of the problem people have with Derrida is with just how much he flaunted the indeterminacy of language and conceptual reasoning. Many people I know who are otherwise great thinkers are very disturbed by the Derridian (and Wittgensteinan) notion that language only ever approximates reality, and that our utterances are at base art-full attempts at signifying realities that only ever have faint resemblance to the things we are referring to. In short, the seeming fact that language - and therefore thought - is always a limited and tentative artifice deeply disturbs and unsettles people who seek or seem to require a degree of personal security in the face of an ever-changing and ulterior world (this refers to what some psychologists call the human requirement for ‘ontological security’). It is as if the indeterminacy of truth and language has wounded them, making them vulnerable to the dark attraction of meaninglessness and nihilism - and by refusing Derrida’s insights and rejecting his work they can keep what they see as ‘irrationality’ or nihilism at bay. But Derrida, following Wittgenstein, was ever diligent in pointing out that efforts to hang on to some pristine vocabulary, favored schema or textual heritage is a fool’s errand.

Yet, following Derrida, I suggest that this bleeding unto nihilism need not be an execution. Derrida’s work, I maintain, affords us the opportunity to accept the indeterminate and contingent aspects of the world, while also freeing us to be more creative and playful in adapting our expressions and communications than we ever thought possible. My reading of Derrida’s work, paradoxically, suggests that it can produce a more reflexive attitude (change in cognition) towards language, truth and speech-acts in the reader, and therefore actually does more to free us from the limited affects of language and signification than we would normally suppose. For me, Derrida’s castration of textuality, language and semantic rationality nudges us to search elsewhere for meaning and value, and unwittingly points us towards more visceral and material (ecological) modes of apprehending the world. Freed from the tyranny of conceptual certainty we thus become more human than can be spoken of.

Therefore, to repeat, it is not at all fair to treat Derrida’s work as mere literary theory if only because he also had/has interesting things to say about human psychology, about human language, and about the nature of human meanings. Despite his literary interests, Derrida’s writings don’t just teach about texts they also teach us about the humans reading texts. And it is in this sense of gathering insights about living in the world that Derrida was a philosopher par excellence.

Toxic Alberta: Oil Sands Toxins Rapidly Increasing

The Globe & Mail is reporting new data released by Environment Canada that shows Canada’s oil sands mining operations produce vast and fast-growing quantities of deadly toxins, including mercury, heavy metals and arsenic. In fact, researchers are reporting a significant increase of 26% in the volume of arsenic and lead in the surrounding watershed in the past four years.[source]

Syncrude facilities reflected off a toxic tailing pond

The arsenic and lead produced and deposited in tailings ponds is the direct result of an extremely energy intensive process of extracting oil from bitumen mines. The mines are owned by Syncrude Canada Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

This new information confirms what ecologists have been arguing for years: the environmental toll exacted by Canada’s auctioning off extracted oil from bitumen to multinational corporations is enormous. Last year alone Tar Sands mining produced 322 tonnes of arsenic, 651 tonnes of lead and measurable volumes of mercury, chromium, vanadium, hydrogen sulphide and cadmium.

In addition, the studies confirm that these companies also released huge amounts of pollutants into the air last year, including 70,658 tonnes of volatile organic compounds, which can damage the function of human organs and nervous systems, and 111,661 tonnes of sulphur dioxide, a key contributor to acid rain.

The numbers are contained in Environment Canada’s national pollutant release inventory, which details the dangerous compounds generated by industrial Canada. New numbers published this weekend track 85 mining facilities that generate tailings and waste rock. Of those, the oil sands produce just under 50,000 tonnes of reportable toxic substances.

Oil sands operations, produced the overwhelming bulk of several dangerous substances: for example, bitumen mines generated nearly all of the Canadian total of acenaphthene, one of a bevy of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons released around Fort McMurray. Such substances can cause tumours of the lung, skin and bladder, and some are carcinogens. And their volumes are growing in north-eastern Alberta: companies generated 42 per cent more acenaphthene in 2009 than they did in 2006.

Yet scientists say simply knowing how much pollution is generated by the oil sands does little to show how toxic the mines’ tailings are. What’s needed is the concentration of the substances – a figure Environment Canada does not provide.

John Giesy, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Toxicology, points to a potato as an example: a grocery store spud contains 600 to 700 chemicals, some of them carcinogens, but they’re in such small quantities that they’re not harmful. “Everything is toxic. It’s the concentration that makes the poison,” he said.

The actual toxicity of oil sands effluent remains a nascent field of scientific inquiry, and intensely guarded by corporate-funded efforts to prevent any research on oil sands toxicity whatsoever.

The numbers “are just ridiculously huge,” said Justin Duncan, a staff lawyer with Ecojustice who helped prosecute the 2007 court case that forced Environment Canada to release the data. “You’re talking hundreds of thousands of kilograms of heavy metals going into some of these tailings ponds. If one of these things bursts, it’s a catastrophic risk to the Athabasca River system.”

At what point is enough enough? Profit only trumps ecology for a short while...

Massive Changes in Greenland Ice as Global Warming Accelerates

Arctic Ice Continues to Deteriorate at Alarming Rate

Researchers notified the world last week that on August 5, 2010 a massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off and become an iceberg in northwestern Greenland.[source] Satellite images of the area show that the Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile-long floating ice shelf. Petermann Glacier is located about 600 miles south of the North Pole. The Petermann glacier is one of Greenland's two largest glaciers and connects Greenland's ice sheet directly with the ocean. Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service is being credited with detecting the ice island early, in fact hours after raw data from a NASA satellite was downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the university.[source]

Detailed studies show that Greenland as a whole is rapidly warming, with accelerated loss of annual ice adding to increases in global sea levels.[source] “Petermann Glacier has stayed about the same size over the last century,” says Andreas Muenchow, a leading scientist studying the latest event. “Well, up until yesterday.”[source] 

From the New York Times:

On Saturday, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachussets, and chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, used the unusual event to fire a salvo at Republican opponents of climate change legislation in the Senate.

“An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Mr. Markey said in a statement. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree Arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.”

I couldn’t have said it better. With all the new data coming in on climate change global warming deniers will find it increasingly difficult to make their case. I'm always amazed at the sheer ignorance it must take to deny what researchers all over the planet are reporting. At this point, many observers are being led to the conclusion that global warming denialism has more to do with people's exclusive interests in their own economic and ideological concerns than in any serious investigation into the issue.

SIDESHOW: Or, alternatively, various Christian websites are attributing the break-up of arctic ice sheets as God’s condemnation of homosexuals – read here: “Massive Ice Glacier Breaks off Greenland, Gays Responsible”. WTF?

Latour On The Death of Critique

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

by Bruno Latour

BP’s oil spill: out of sight, out of mind?

Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorists. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destructions? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of critical spirit? Has it not run out of steam?

Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aligned to the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, technology of their projectiles, of their smart bombs, of their missiles: I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sort of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academe, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly continue to do the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids–yes, young recruits, young cadets–for wars that cannot be thought, for fighting enemies long gone, for conquering territories that no longer exist and leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we have not anticipated, for which we are so thoroughly disarmed? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late–especially French generals, especially these days; what would be so surprising, after all, if intellectuals were also one war late, one critique late–especially French intellectuals, especially now? It has been a long time, after all, since intellectuals have stopped being in the vanguard of things to come. Indeed, it has been a long time now since the very notion of the avant-garde–the proletariat, the artistic–has passed away, has been pushed aside by other forces, moved to the rear guard, or may be lumped with the baggage train. We are still able to go through the motions of a critical avant-garde, but is not the spirit gone?

In this most depressing of times, these are some of the issues I want to press not to depress the reader but to press ahead, to redirect our meager capacities as fast as possible. To prove my point, I have not exactly facts rather tiny cues, nagging doubts, disturbing telltale signs. What has become of critique, I wonder, when the New York Times runs the following story?

Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a lobbyist for the Republicans] seems to acknowledge as much when he says that "the scientific debate is closing against us." His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled," he writes, "their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

Fancy that? An artificially maintained scientific controversy to favor a "brown backlash" as Paul Ehrlich would say. Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?

Read More @ Critical Inquiry

Naming Names: Top 12 Most Unethical Multinational Corporations

click to enlarge

It seems the good folks of the ideologically bent Huffington Post assembled a crack team of lefty journalists to explicate the findings of the Swiss research firm Covalence, who annually ranks the overall ethical performance of the world's most profitable multinational corporations.

The idea behind the Covalence research is that there's value – both for companies and consumers – in measuring corporations against clear ethical standards. The rankings include a list of the top 12 most dangerous and least ethical corporations on the planet.

Some of the usual suspects are there - and the Huff provides ample evidence and support for Covalence’s research findings. Bask in the non-glory of the earth-eating greed-machines:

1. Monsanto - the Missouri-based agriculture giant leads the world in the production of genetically-engineered seed, and has been subject to myriad criticisms. Among them: the company is accused of frequently and unfairly suing small farmers for patent infringement.

2. Halliburton – Among other crazy-unethical practices, the oil, gas and logistical company famously associated with former Vice President Dick Cheney unfairly procured billions of dollars in government contracts for oil repair in the country after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

3. Chevron - The oil and gas behemoth has been accused of tax evasion as well a number of environmental infractions in several countries around the world. But perhaps most controversial was a 1998 episode in Nigeria: after protesters took hostages as part of a demonstration against the company, Nigerian soldiers shot at the demonstrators, killing two. Chevron was accused of facilitating the transport of the soldiers, known for their "general history of committing abuses," to the scene.

4. Freeport-McMoRan – This copper and gold producer has run into opposition in Indonesia's Papua province, where they clash with locals who try to claim the area's vast gold deposits for themselves – reportedly the largest in the world.

5. Philip Morris International - One of the world's leading cigarette manufacturers reportedly attempted, earlier this month, to persuade the government to abandon its ten-year-old lawsuit against the tobacco industry for allegedly concealing the dangers of cigarettes.

6. Occidental Petroleum - One of America's largest oil and gas companies, it has been involved in a number of territory disputes in multiple countries, including Ecuador and Colombia. The company also drew ire from environmentalists in 2005, when it proposed building a road through Ecuador's Yasuní National Park. (good luck with that now)

7. Ryanair - Michael O'Leary, the CEO of Irish budget airline, is known for his outrageous behavior and aggressive cost-cutting measures. Employees of his company are reportedly forbidden from using the company's pens or charging their cellphones with its electricity. And O'Leary has been known to get nasty with customers, allegedly yelling and cursing at one person who requested a refund after a relative fell ill.

8. Syngenta - The Swiss agriculture and chemicals company was fined by the EPA in 2008 for pesticide-related infringements, and one of its former employees was recently awarded nearly $2 million after she was wrongly fired for reporting discrimination in the workplace.

9. Grupo Mexico – In 2007, the mining giant’s workers at Mexicana, the copper mine in Cananea, northern Mexico (pictured), went on strike to protest safety and health violations -- and more than two years later, the workers are still striking.

10. Total SA - French oil and gas company Total has been accused of building a pipeline with the aid of slave labor in Myanmar. In addition, in 1999 one of the company's oil tankers, the Erika, which had 30,000 tons of oil on board, sunk off of the coast of Brittany. The company is desperately fighting in court to prevent having to compensate the victims of the spill.

11. Mediaset - the massive Italian television company Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi founded and still controls, ranked eleventh worst in the survey of ethical multinationals. Late last year, Berlusconi's government raised eyebrows when it attempted to double the tax rate of one of Mediaset's main competitors.

12. Barrick Gold Corporation - the Toronto-based gold-mining corporation had a hand in the burning of at least 130 homes near its Porgera Mine in Papua New Guinea, manipulating land titles in Australia and Chile, and creating a toxic spill in Tanzania that continues to produce dangerous levels of arsenic in the area around its North Mara mine.

I’m fairly certain there are a few other multinational corporations that might deserve to be on this list (such as the tragedy formerly know as Blackwater, Syncrude, Goldman Sachs), but I’m also sure that these cast of humanity-haters have also earned this particular honor.

Details @ The Huffington Post

Check Out Related Crazy-Making Stories:

• Big Business Getting Richer
• Goldman Sachs Earns 250m as Punishment for Fraud
• Capitalism: A Denial Story
• Wall Street's Top 10 Lies of 2010
• Shock, Awe and the Psychology of Economic Warfare
• Harvey on the Crisis of Capitalism
• The Money Masters

Kanesatake Mohawk Resistance Rising

Mohawk warriors from Kanesatake in Oka, Quebec are again resisting encroachment on their ancestral lands - this time by corporate developer of luxury homes Norfolk Financial. Around 30 Kanesatake warriors confronted Norfolk developer Normand Ducharme and his entourage today after Ducharme arrived on disputed Kanesatake land looking to survey, cut away ‘dead trees’ and begin marking off locations for potential construction. [source] This latest encroachment by profiteers is taking place despite positive and ongoing negotiations between the provincial government and Mohawk leaders on resititution and land entitlements.

Mohawks mobilizing to confront developer (Aug 6, 2010)

While most Kanestake residents were dressed in regular clothing, a few wore masks and camouflage, and were heard threatening Ducharme if he didn't leave immediately.

Twenty years after the infamous “Oka Crisis”, Kanesatake Mohawks are still fighting for their rights with the Quebec government, as developers and corporations are lining up to eventually rush in to exploit the land and peoples who have lived there for hundreds of years.

Norfolk Financial wants to build luxury homes on the property despite a long-standing freeze on “development” mandated by the elected municipality of Oka. Oka Mayor Richard Lalonde said Friday he hopes the issue can be resolved through negotiations. [source] Kanesatake Grand Chief Sohenrise Paul Nicholas accused the developer of orchestrating a publicity stunt, and opening old wounds – and said the Mohawk council is considering pressing charges against Ducharme:

"I'm disappointed with Norfolk for coming in and provoking what I would consider almost a riot today. This is a situation that pushes people's buttons emotionally. We're 20 years after the crisis and people still have issues with policing and land in the area. Them coming in is just a tactic to increase the value of their land. It was just a big publicity stunt." [source]

He was also optimistic that the long-simmering land dispute over the property would soon be resolved, once and for all. "Norfolk lands will be expropriated and returned to the Mohawks of Kanesatake. What they're trying to do is add more money to the pot at our expense." [source] Ducharme responded by saying, "I've got the rights to these lands, I've got the title deeds for these lands, these lands are legally ours." [source]

Quebec Provincial Police officers were standing by throughout the tense 60 minutes or so of the confrontation in the case of an escalation of violence between the developer and Mohawks. "We are watching the situation," Sgt. Gregory Gomez del Prado said, adding that police would intervene only if necessary. "For now this is a civil disagreement." The standoff ended (for now) with provincial police escorting the developer from the disputed land. [source]

20 years ago the original “Oka Crisis” helped me find my path as an activist, anthropologist and ultimately as a person. I have nothing but respect for the Kanesatake people and feel that their struggle is our struggle - we are a species struggling to live in a more enlightened and humane world. Too bad we don’t already live in such a world.

Read More @ Vancouver Sun / Windsor Star / CBC / Ottawa Citizen

Ecuador Signs $3.6 billion Deal to Stay Out of Amazonian Park

San Rafael Falls on the Quijos River in Yasuni National Park 
- click to enlarge -

How much would you pay for the most biologically rich ecosystem on the planet? Over a billion dollars? At least.

I was truly astonished today to learn that the Ecuadorian government has signed a 3.6 billion dollar deal, brokered by the United Nations, to not plunder a major part of the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil block in the Yasuni national park – some 675 sq miles of pristine rainforest. The pioneering deal will see a legally binding trust fund set up by wealthy countries that will partially compensate the South American country for the “forfeiting” of an estimated $7 billion profit that could be made from the extraction of crude oil and other natural resources in the area. Under the terms of the agreement the oil and the timber in Yasuni will never be exploited. [source]

Conservation groups have been staggered by the biological riches in the park, which is situated at the intersection of the Amazon, the Andes and the equator. It was recently found to have 650 species of tree and shrub within a single hectare – the highest number in the world and more than in the whole of North America. In addition, it has more than 20 threatened mammal species, including, jaguars, otters and monkeys, and several hundred bird species. [source]

The idea of rich countries paying poor countries not to exploit their forests in return for financial compensation is being promoted at the global climate talks which reconvened this week in Bonn, Germany. But the idea of paying poor countries not to develop valuable oil reserves is believed to be the most radical and most forward-looking yet.

Helga Serrano, a representative from the Ecuadorean foreign ministry made the following comments yesterday in Bonn:

"The object is to preserve biodiversity and prevent climate change emissions. Ecuador is an oil-exporting country and the oil reserves in Yasuni have been shown to represent 20% of the oil in the whole country. We will keep the oil underground indefinitely. We think $3.6bn is a fair contribution from developed countries.” [source]

While some conservation groups hailed the establishment of the UN trust fund for Yasuni as "historic", yesterday the CONAIE umbrella indigenous organization warned that the UN-brokered deal was not the end of the fight. "We don't want Correa to offset his lost income from leaving the ITT oil in the ground by opening up other areas of equally pristine indigenous lands," the group's leader, Marlon Santi, told reporters. [source]

Human rights groups are also criticizing the Ecuadorean government for using the conservation initiative to mask plans to open up other parts of the Amazon to oil development, and to re-open old oil blocks that had been closed because of resistance by indigenous people. [source]

In response, Daniel Ortega, an environment and climate change ministry spokesman said:

“We are seeking nothing less than a new paradigm for development. This is what the majority of people in Ecuador want. Yasuni will remain protected through generations." [source]

Any money raised would be administered by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and would go to protect 4.8m hectares of land in Ecuador's other national parks – including the Galapagos Islands – and to develop renewable energy sources and build schools and hospitals for indigenous groups.

So far, only European countries have shown a firm interest in contributing to the fund. Germany has said it may pay $800m over 13 years, with Spain, France and Switzerland reportedly seriously considering the offer - and Guatemala and Nigeria are reported to be asking Ecuador for help setting up similar programmes.

see related coverage here:
.
Ecuador Agrees to Keep Amazon Eco-Treasure Free of Oil Drilling

Monkeynomics

Primatologist Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, primates make too. We are lovely creatures. Enjoy:

OOO Gone Relational?

It has been exceptionally interesting recently checking in on the speculative realism niche now that Tim Morton has hitched his wagon to the OOO carnival. I wonder: am I imagining things? The guy who posts youtube videos talking at length about the interdependence off all things wants to team up with the young object-obsessed philosophes of the continental circles? Huh?

My first thought was maybe Morton is looking for exposure and blogosphere credibility by snuggling up to Bryant and crew - thereby gaining the attention of a whole cadre of young grad students in the process. After more considered thought, I realized that Morton might perhaps see something in object-focused rhetoric that does in fact ‘resonate’ with his seemingly more relational and ecologically sensitive approach? And if this is indeed the case, then maybe I have been missing some subtle nuance to OOO, and of Bryant’s onticology in particular, that I should probably investigate further?

Here are a few recent examples of comments from Bryant with what seems to me to be a bit of a relational turn in Object-Oriented truth-speak:

“Within the framework of my onticology, the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation draws our attention to what takes place when relations between beings emerge. There are not two terms here, but three terms: Virtual proper being, local manifestation, and exo-relations. [source]

“What I don’t understand is why objects are conceived as fixed and static. Nothing in our experience seems to suggest such a characterization of objects. Objects become, they decay, they evolve, and so on.” [source]

“In addition to this, I argue that objects are dynamic systems.”[source]

"Objects are generated out of other objects. When objects enter into certain relations with one another closure, under certain circumstances, is achieved and a new object is born. In other words, objects are emergent entities that emerge out of other entities. It seems to me that object-oriented ontologists talk about such emergence quite often. Likewise, the destruction or perishing of objects takes place when enough of the parts belonging to the endo-structure of an object are destroyed or taken away, undermining the ability of the object to maintain itself across time." [source]

I still can't figure out why, if objects are dynamic systems and 'become and decay', Bryant wants to signify such a temporary and fleeting individuality with the term “virtual proper being” split off, or “in excess of”, the actually existing entity? I’m not sure if this is Bryant accepting deep relationality into his ontology of objects, or if these few sentences are mere concessions as he tries to mesh his framework in with Morton’s? Or have I been reading too much into Bryant’s ‘spit objects’ all along - missing the more relational and more transitive aspects of objects as Bryant conceives them?

In fact, after re-reading several posts at Larval Subjects this weekend, as well as Graham Harman’s recent email exchange with an interested reader, I may be finally beginning to understand the more important reason OOO is positing radically withdrawn entities or 'split objects': namely, the depth of things. If I just accept that Bryant’s decision to champion some supposed ‘virtual’ dimension of objects as unfortunate, and instead appreciate the more important point his “spilt objects” formulation is trying to raise (as I see it) about the stratification and complexity of what I call 'things', I can then join with OOO in an appreciation of the real power and depth of objects in the world.

For me, and probably not for Graham or Bryant, the point of object-oriented rhetoric then becomes to remind us that all object-things “withdraw” because they have depth. Things seem “split” because they have depth. And this is the sort of depth that can indeed remain partially hidden from our view (appearing to us as what Harman calls "sensual objects") and that can retain a high degree of stability within the flux and situational expression of its more readily available 'surface' properties (what many call 'qualities'). That is to say, things have layers, much like Shrek - and it is by virtue of a thing's layers, strata or assembled properties that it rises up from the background mesh to become an individual that makes a difference in the world.

Now Bryant and Graham might not see it the same way, but in the sense described above I completely agree with OOO that “objects” may just be the most important ‘actants’, ‘agents’ and ‘operators’ in the kosmos – and thereby should command an appropriate amount of our attention. Yet, what I and others have suggested is that object-ness or ‘individuality’ is only a part of the onto-story we should want to tell. There is absolutely no need to subordinate relationality conceptually in our speculations about ‘the way things are’. If quantum mechanics, molecular biology and energy physics (to suggest but a few) are to be believed, all things are simultaneously entangled and deeply relational with internal and external relations at varying scales and with varying intensities – ontically open to non-locality, hybridization, parasitic relation, decomposition, outgrowthm, ect. – while also occasionally coalescing together in such a way as to generate unique individuals or assemblages, with defining and specific actualizing characteristics or properties.

In less words, object-things never completely “withdraw”, and are never truly “split”. Objects are never truly autonomous and without supporting context or relations. Objects continuously interpenetrate, mix and mingle in relation. And all things are never too far from contact because they are implicated (and intimated) in the same actualizing ‘flesh’ and flourish of the world. No matter how ‘deep’ or stratified (mereologically speaking) an assemblage-object is it is still part of the world from which it comes and simultaneously relative and in relation to other things. All objects are coalesced actualities with specific and immanent material-energetic properties enmeshed in the real kosmos. Everything about objects involves properties borrowed from elsewhere, and elsewhere always comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is nowhere other than right here: the immanent life.

And yet the OOO peeps, in my evaluation, are still insightful because they are making the ‘depth of objects’ a priority by arguing (in their own way) that all assembled entities have buried deep within them a certain degree of irreducible individuality (or strict onto-idiosyncrasy) that acts upon the world. And because of that OOO is a required discourse for our times.

In discussion with Jeff Bell on another topic Bryant says the following:

I will say– and Graham, no doubt, will box me around the ears for this –that I wonder how significant these differences are. In other words, at the level of analytic praxis I suspect we’d come to similar and complimentary conclusions and just desire to place emphasis in different areas. With Graham, Whitehead, and Shaviro, my universe is Leibnizian or discrete, whereas the Deleuzian-Bergsonian-Spinozist universe is monistic and then carved up. I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes, however, at the level of concrete analysis… A terrible thing to confess. [source]

I like this "confession" because it shows much more flexibility than Bryant has historically shown in my opinion. And it is in this vein that I read the 'withdrawal' and 'split objects' thesis as refering to the depth and irreducible individuality of objects. And it is because of concrete analysis on percpetion and actual interacting entities that I will choose to place the emphasis there.

I need to flesh many of these ideas out more, but for now, and in sum, I want to reiterate the kernel of my own position by suggesting that a thorough investigation of the actual world indicates that the kosmos generates ‘objects’ via relations, and that the dynamics involved reveal not two separate dimensions, but one contingent and simultaneous reality of being and becoming.