Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[First paragraph] Water: The life force of all creation, the generative dynamism of existence. Long before scientific experimentation and quantifiable instrumentation verified the facts, human beings have perceived and understood water to be the essence of all life, both material and spiritual. From the beginnings of recorded history and even before, across the expanse of human settlement and migration, indigenous as well as extraneous religions and spiritual traditions have celebrated water as the primordial source: water was sacred before it was material and water took on for multitudes of generations until even today an expansive inclusivity that scanned the literal to the metaphoric. Human civilizations began and flourished along waterways and all first peoples identified both the miraculous life-giving but also the concomitant life-ending power of water: water falls and streams, longitudinal and lateral water-ways, rivers and other bodies of water, have been from earliest times demarcated as sacred topography.1 The Cherokee of the southern Appalachians mountain range in southern Tennessee know the river in their midst as Yunwi Gamahida or “the Long Man,” an abiding, benevolent spiritual entity whose waters were believed to be the source of wisdom and curative of all ills and whose “hands” nurtured all Cherokee lives (Nabokov 53-57).2 Across the geographical landscape, the Taos Pueblo people have always considered all lakes and ponds in the neighboring high mountains as sacred sites but they hold in especial regard the mystical Blue Lake (Ba Whyea) as the source of all creation (Nickens and Nickens 23; see also Nabokov 73-78). Blue Lake is the bountiful center of all existence, the liminal place of both birth and death, the eternal source from which living spirits emerge to animate all creation and to which the spirits return upon the cessation of physical life.

[First paragraph] Bruno Latour’s project attempts to overcome the dualism between nature and culture that still persists in our world. My focus will reside on three of Latour’s books, namely, We Have Never Been Modern, Reassembling the Social, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Since the way we live our lives greatly influences the way we think and, consequently, our philosophical positions, it is important to say something about Bruno Latour’s biography. His life was extremely inter and transdisciplinary, a strong reason for his work to be so non-orthodox (Blok and Jensen 8).

[First paragraph of Introduction] In the last 20 years, the number of tourists venturing into remote parts of the Arctic has increased dramatically. This rapid growth has shifted the region from a niche expedition destination reserved for hardy explorers to a popular bucket list item luring tourists with the promise of an exotic adventure to be experienced en masse. Although the phenomenon of mass tourism in the Arctic is relatively new, it fits into broader themes of globalization in which today far more people are aware of distant places, interested in global travel, and are able to afford both the means and time to travel for pleasure. Revolutions in affordable transportation in the modern era have made travel more affordable and accessible for people than ever before while the proliferation of social media around the globe has romanticized images of far-flung places. As such, “low-priced transportation and organized tours have played a huge role in the increase in global tourism” even to the world’s most remote and unlikely places (Ritzer & Dean, 2015, p. 289).

In contrast to many Hollywood climate fiction films, Snowpiercer (2013) offers a more complex representation of the white male savior. In contrast to films like WALL-E (2008) and Interstellar (2014) that recuperate and invest in white masculine privilege, Snowpiercer highlights the more destructive aspects of a patriarchal capitalist system that privileges hegemonic white masculinity. While the ending of Snowpiercer may seem bleak, it also points to the possibility of a new system, an environmental futurity that centers indigenous knowledge and the experiences of women and people of color. Though Snowpiercer is not formally an American film, its casting of recognizable Hollywood stars situates this film in a transnational American cinema context, and this is part of what makes this film interesting to examine in contrast to mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.

[First paragraph] The opening scene of the acclaimed documentary King Corn (2007) shows Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, main protagonists, learning that corn constitutes one of the main carbon molecules of their hair. Segue to introduce the crop’s omnipresence in North American processed foods, principally used as sweetener, starch and animal feeds, the almost banal scientific fact presented in this scene is mesmerizing, providing a somewhat embodied support to the popular environmentalist saying “you are what you eat,” or to Donna Haraway’s poetic understanding of bodies and species as “full of their own others, full of messmates, of companions” (Haraway 2008, 165). Corn has indeed subtly made its way into our body, bite after bite, making it hard not to share Ian and Curtis’ awe while watching the film’s opening scene as it suggests that we, eaters of North American food, unknowingly became corn. Well established as the darling crop of nutritional technoscience, the introduction of genetically engineered corn in the late nineties juxtaposed to its wide presence in processed foods has spawned important political resistance, especially within Indigenous communities in Mexico. From street protest, field-testing to heirloom seeds international distribution, what is it exactly these activists were so desperately trying to protect?

[From first paragraph] This paper describes the role of socially engaged art practices in opening up our pedagogical imaginations to foster reflexive and creative approaches to building the local food movement. These contemporary artistic engagements with local food or ‘food system localization’ are in the genre of what has been called social practice artwork or, in other words, art practices that focus less on the production of a singular aesthetic object and more on the relational and experiential aspects of participatory interaction in a creative process (e.g., Kester; Finkerpearl). In this context, I examine social practice artworks that create experimental communities built around shared practices of growing and eating locally grown food in cities; such as FARM:shop in Dalston, UK, or Edible Estates, on suburban front lawns around the world.