Timothy Gitzen

Review of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic by Lisa E. Bloom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 288 pp, and Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic by Charlotte Wrigley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 256 pp.

In the wake of the Covid-19 viral pandemic, an October 2022 Guardian piece proclaimed that the ‘next pandemic may come from melting glaciers,’ describing a recent scientific study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the viral spillover of ancient viruses in the arctic (Geddes, 2022). Studies of soil and sediments from Lake Hazen, the high arctic’s largest freshwater lake, suggest that the potential for frozen ancient viruses to affect new hosts for the first time might be greater the closer a potential host is to melting glaciers (Geddes, 2022). As Arctic ice and permafrost (i.e., frozen earth) melt, much quicker than previously predicted (Harvey, 2023), animal populations are displaced and migrate to new lands while humans begin navigating areas that were once frozen. These narratives of frozen anthropocentric crises, I contend, reveal the slow violence of melting glacial ice and thawing permafrost.

The domino effect of rapidly thawing ice in the Arctic and even Antarctic regions lies at the heart of Lisa Bloom’s 2022 book Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic. Bloom situates thawing ice and anthropogenic climate change through the eyes of filmmakers, artists, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic. She not only critiques the masculinist narrative of exploration that once dominated the Arctic and Antarctic landscapes but draws much needed attention to the slow violence of climate change across the globe. While melting glaciers may seem to immediately affect those in the Arctic region, Bloom demonstrates, through artistic representation and activist attention, how melting glaciers have profound affects all over the world. She mobilizes the notion of ‘anthropogenic landscapes’ to argue that human-led climate change has unevenly affected certain peoples and landscapes, whereby pollution in the Arctic affects populations both there and elsewhere.

Charlotte Wrigley is equally concerned with rapidly thawing and breaking up of ice and permafrost in her 2023 book Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic. Wrigley explores the effects of the melting and disappearance of permafrost in the Arctic, arguing that such disappearance is leading to what she calls a ‘discontinuous form of extinction.’ This means, according to Wrigley, that extinction is a process of becoming discontinuous, linking together different patches of experiences, land, and temporalities together to understand extinction as not a universal experience but differentiated among human and nonhuman populations. Wrigley mobilizes the STS notion of ‘cryopolitics’—a politics of not only that which is frozen, but the active freezing of human and nonhuman samples and potential slow violence that emerges within both ‘cryogenic cultures’ and freezing/melting terrains (Radin and Kowal, 2017)—to draw attention to the ways freezing and thawing foster a politics of life through storage, preservation, and extension. As such, she moves through four ideas of extinction: human extinction, Arctic extinction, non-human extinction, and de-extinction.

Both Bloom and Wrigley work to untangle grand narratives of the Anthropocene by offering competing, or discontinuous, narratives that do less to show the wholeness of the Earth than the fractured experience of Earth/earth itself. One way they do this is by attending to what Rob Nixon (2011) calls the ‘slow violence’ of climate change, directly referenced in Bloom’s book. For Nixon (2011) environmental slow violence takes place ‘out of sight,’ delayed in its destruction as it reverberates across space and time. Sympatico with slow violence, Bloom posits that climate change shifts and inverts our perspective on time, instantiating a ‘deep time of permanence’ that disorients and slows ‘planetary destruction,’ thereby requiring a new narrative that accounts for this temporality of climate change (p. 164). Bloom’s focus on extinction similarly confounds linear temporal categories. The ‘slow unraveling’ of extinction, in Thom van Doreen’s (2014, p. 12) estimation, makes extinction ‘an often imperceptible process’ that entangles species relations, which induces ‘fraying at the seams’ of the web of life (Wrigley, 2023, 13). Such attention to temporality indexes STS studies that work to dislodge the primacy of the Anthropocene and highlight the intersection of human and nonhuman agents (e.g., Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Liboiron, 2021), in particular bringing an increased attention to ice as an object of study (Hastrup, 2013). Stated alternatively, ice matters; for Bloom it matters as a vehicle of environmental and social change, and for Wrigley it matters as a lived experience. Both demonstrate the ways ice is a temporal marker that decenters anthropocentric perspectives on climate change and time itself (Yip, 2022). Although both are concerned with temporal slowness, they mobilize ice differently as an ‘interscalar vehicle’ of climate change (Rider, 2022): Bloom attends to the slow rippling effect that climate change in the Arctic (and Antarctic) has on other locations around the world, while Wrigley focuses on the quotidian experience of villages built on melting permafrost.

I argue that analyzing these two books requires attention to how both eschew the Anthropocene’s wholeness by either slowing time to account for incremental forms of violence or expand to cover entire temporal eras. A focus on temporality also highlights the crisis of climate change. Crisis represents ruptures in normativity, when societal norms are explicitly challenged (Roitman, 2013), and temporality becomes discontinuous. The crisis of climate change displaces violence onto those populations and communities that rely on the frozen earth/Earth for home and sustenance, be these populations and communities residents of the Arctic or dependent on ice to prevent flooding. Violence therefore operates at both at the quotidian level and through epochs, but it also engenders different scales, from the earth of the permafrost to the Earth of the interconnected communities across the globe.

Addressing the dominance of the Anthropocene narrative, Wrigley challenges the apocalyptic rendering of the present as the march towards mass extinction by querying the discontinuity of permafrost and the Earth itself. Doing so demonstrates how Anthropocene narratives actually flatten the Earth and speak of a ‘whole Earth’ when, as Wrigley deftly explicates, there are continuous cracks forming through human and non-human experiences and existences (p. 177). This means that these experiences and existences form different ideas of extinction: human, non-human, Arctic, and de-extinction. For Wrigley, the supposition that there are four types of extinctions—though she is cognizant of the heuristic inadequacies of this categorization—offers a discontinuous approach to not only the Anthropocene writ large, but the very notion of extinction. She does this to tell ‘multiple stories of Anthropocene extinction’ (p. 15), all connected to the permafrost but across different temporalities. Here the normativity implicit in the Anthropocene—a human-centered, ‘whole Earth’ image of crisis—is challenged by the consideration of multiple extinctions that may or may not be in congruence with one another. In Wrigley’s words, extinction as a discontinuous process—as a form of becoming— ‘reimagines modes of life, death, and survival that are not enclosed events, but rather an intersecting web of different temporalities, scales, materialities, and ontologies’ (p. 12-13).

Here, Bloom’s contribution to climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic proves a useful companion. Bloom posits that ‘new polar aesthetics’ are necessary to highlight how human and nonhuman worlds are interdependent, thus displacing the primacy of the Anthropocene concept (p. 13). Challenging the normativity of the Anthropocene and interrogating what she calls anthropogenic landscapes, Bloom unravels the intersecting spaces of the social and the environmental within the climate crisis itself. One central way Bloom does this is in her critique of the masculinist hero narrative of explorers in the polar regions, mobilizing decolonial and indigenous art forms as method for highlighting the discontinuity, to borrow from Wrigley, of anthropogenic landscapes. In other words, this new polar aesthetics tells a different story of the polar region,  drawing attention to the interconnections between human and non-human actors. Such a methodology aligns with Wrigley’s separate narratives of the four types of (discontinuous) extinctions. Indeed, both methodologies work to not only displace the normativity of the crisis, be it masculinist or a totalizing Anthropocene narrative, and reveals how such normative crises have become routinized. They tell different stories of crises.

Attention to slow violence in Bloom’s work means interrogating the ‘indirect signs and symptoms of destruction, both material and psychic, that are often … difficult to track or aggregate or even to prove’ (p. 134). For instance, Bloom discusses Amy Balkin’s exhibit ‘A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting’ and how Balkin focuses on two glaciers in the Antarctic that are melting, and if the glaciers melt, they could raise the sea level 200 feet by the end of the century. Bloom remarks that it is ‘fraught and difficult’ for non-expert residents to document melting ice because they notice the daily struggles they must live with when their villages and lands are disappearing compared to the abstractness of scientific measurement (p. 135). A similar example emerges out of drilling in the Arctic since, as Bloom describes, the drilling and disappearing landscape and habitats are ‘literally out of sight’ to most people around the world, but accessible to the fossil fuel industry (p. 134). The effect is the ‘slow-motion disaster’ that indigenous residents of Kivalina Island in Alaska experience of their village being washed away (p. 137). And yet the effects are not limited to Arctic residents, for Bloom notes that Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather about storms and displacement in Bangladesh encapsulate the ways climate change and melting ice in the Arctic slowly ripples through the rest of the world.

For Wrigley, challenging the grand narrative of anthropogenic extinction means attending to the ways thawing permafrost is already destroying the livelihoods and homes of residents in the Arctic. While pieces like the one in The Guardian mentioned earlier proclaim the possibility of the next pandemic in the Arctic—a future-oriented crisis that averts those of the present—Wrigley is concerned with how residents in the Russian Arctic are facing degradation and dilapidation now, as the permafrost upon which their homes are built melts. Infrastructure is quite literally shifting from under them. The developing aridness of lands engenders ‘liminal freeze/thaw and slow durations’ of extinction—and violence—that challenges the ‘singular relation between human … and planet’ found in apocalyptic and anthropogenic narratives of extinction (p. 43). To stave off extinction, what Wrigley calls de-extinction, some work to ‘rewild’ the Arctic, using what Jamie Lorimer (2020) has called a ‘probiotic approach’ – for example the creation of the controversial Pleistocene Park, located in the Sakha Republic in northeastern Russia and known for attempting to genetically engineer a wooly mammoth, operated by father-son duo Sergey and Nikita Zimov. The Pleistocene Park works to reengineer entire ecosystems era by reintroducing keystone species with as little human intervention as possible (p. 9; see also Lorimer, 2020). This effort to reverse extinction seeks to revitalize the Arctic ecosystem through rewilding with Pleistocene megafauna, such as mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses.

If normative time moves in linear fashion—past to present to future—then both Bloom and Wrigley work to add a bit of chaos to such normativity: Wrigley posits this as a discontinuous approach. For instance, in the example of rewilding the Arctic and attempting to replicate a Pleistocene ecosystem and megafauna, the question of extinction is thrown into relief. If de-extinction is possible, then what happens to the linear passage of time when what used to be past can now be present or future? Furthermore, entire mammoths are kept perfectly frozen in the permafrost, complete with nearly pristine DNA. And so, if DNA can be extracted from these bones, are they truly extinct? Temporality unravels and buttresses against the seemingly normative temporality of crisis, where the era-spanning temporality of extinction collides with the slowness of climate change violence.

For Bloom, the emergence of new polar aesthetics similarly queries the normativity of a linear progression of time. Such aesthetics are certainly representations of both a past (through memory) and the urgency of the present, but they also ask after the uncertainty of the future. How is crisis understood in the longue durée of planetary time, both past and future? Wrigley provides one answer with the four types of extinction—human extinction, Arctic extinction, nonhuman extinction, and de-extinction—and the direct challenge to extinction as an anthropogenic crisis. This means that while extinction in the Anthropocene is seen as the cessation of human life—and thus the end of the Earth, a selfish deduction—Wrigley contends that other extinctions not only exist but are currently happening in the Arctic.

I end by returning to the slowness of both violence and extinction and the ways slowness is itself a crisis that challenges the normative disposition of time. The slow violence that melting ice and thawing permafrost have on, most notably, indigenous residents of the Arctic is swept away for the quickness and inevitability of climate change elsewhere. More than attunement to the ways climate change is a crisis unevenly distributed and felt, Bloom and Wrigley encourage us to see the trees rather than the forest, for in those slow, decaying details of the present compared to the quickness of the impending future, we see the current and inordinate violence that humans and nonhumans alike are experiencing. The discontinuous permafrost and ice are not only material realities, but metaphorical figures to interrogate our relationship to the nonhuman world, which, for both Bloom and Wrigley, includes the discontinuous lives of ice and permafrost. For scholars of climate change and science and technology studies, both books offer a different approach that seeks to not only eschew dominating narratives of the Anthropocene by either slowing time or expanding it across eras, but by drawing much needed attention to the role of nonhumans in the routinization of climate crises. Similarly, it refocuses attention on ice as both an object and method of analysis that highlights these nonhuman connections.

References

Geddes, L. (2022) Next Pandemic May Come from Melting Glaciers, New Data Shows, The Guardian, October 18, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/19/next-pandemic-may-come-from-melting-glaciers-new-data-shows.

Harvey, C. (2023) Glaciers May Melt Even Faster Than Expected, Study Find,. Scientific American, April 6, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/glaciers-may-melt-even-faster-than-expected-study-finds/.

Hastrup, K. (2013) The Ice as Argument : Topographical Mementos in the High Arctic. Cambridge Anthropology, 31(1), 51–67.

Liboiron, M. (2021) Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press).

Lorimer, J. (2020) The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Radin, J., & Kowal, E. (2017) Introduction: The Politics of Low Temperature. In J. Radin & E. Kowal (Eds.), Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (pp. 3–26). MIT Press.

Rider, A. (2022) Ice. In T. Neale, C. Addison, & T. Pha (Eds.), An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: experiments in the fundamental (pp. 83–94). University of Toronto Press.

Roitman, J. (2013) Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press).

Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Tsing, A., H. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt, eds. (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Van Doreen, T. (2104) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press).

Yip, J. (2022) Sea ice out of time: Reckoning with environmental change. Time and Society, 31(4), 561–583.