Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Alaimo, Stacy

Titel

Deep Sea Speculations: Science and the Animating Arts of William Beebe, Else Bostelmann, and John Wyndham: ICFA 42 Guest Scholar Keynote

Ist Teil von

• Journal of the fantastic in the arts, 2022-09, Vol.33 (3), p.69-91

Ort / Verlag

Pocatello: The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Multispecies speculations can inspire ecological design on any scale, from native plants that serve pollinators on a patio to corridors that connect patchy wildlife habitats. While I think the concept remains a useful way of considering the magnitude of how particular groups of humans, through colonization, genocide, and capitalist extractivism have altered the planet, I am disturbed by the standard visual depictions of the anthropocene that erase the existence, geographical locales, and agencies of a multitude of nonhuman species, aggrandizing human agency by exaggerating the flattening and deadening of the world.3 While such images can serve as an environmental critique of the vast ecological harm that certain groups of humans have done, they erase the lively presence of the nonhuman species who are struggling to survive, making their ultimate invisibility, irrelevance, and extinction a fait accompli. While Beebe's imaginative regard for marine life and his dramatizations of how aesthetic encounters overwhelm scientific practice are not articulated within the framework of environmentalism, they can be read as a prelude to posthumanist theory and critical animal studies.4 Moreover, his sense of how the visual and literary arts animate the objects of science-an animation that refuses to reduce all that is not human to inert resources for human use-contests anthropocentric versions of "environmentalism," including the Progressive Conservation movement at the turn of the 20th century, and most climate change and sustainability movements at the turn of the 21st century. [...]industrial scale natural history made for better science" (324).